Journées MAS de la SMAI
Modélisation et Statistiques des Réseaux
Rennes, 27-29 août 2008

James ROBERTS

Traffic theory for the Internet and the future Internet

Traffic theory aims to clarify the probabilistic relationship between capacity, demand and performance in a range of networking contexts. Unfortunately, the Internet has been designed without much regard to this kind of theory leading to propositions for QoS architectures in particular that are less than entirely satisfactory. Despite this, of course, IP is extremely successful and rapidly becoming the preferred support for all communications services. Yet the network may be becoming a victim of its own success as widening usage and increasing demand tend to accentuate a number of deficiencies in a network architecture that was designed more than 30 years ago for a quite different set of applications. This is leading to calls throughout the world for research on the architecture of an alternative, future Internet that, among other requirements, should offer predictable and appropriate quality to the full range of anticipated applications. It is opportune, therefore, to re-examine the lessons learnt from past research on the performance of multiservice networks like the Internet and how they should be taken into account in the design of network resource sharing mechanisms.