Priority and Realtime Data Transfer over the Best-effort Internet

The current Internet provides a single class of
best-effort service with no guarantee as to when or
even whether a packet is to be delivered. Network
applications, however, have a wide variety of quality
of service requirements. Achieving the diverse
requirements of the applications using the
single-class service is a challenging task.
In this book, we study providing real-time and
prioritized data transfer over the best-effort
Internet, emphasizing a practical application-level
approach using TCP, which requires no change to the
current Internet architecture and transport
protocols. We exemplify this approach using three
widely used applications: multimedia streaming,
low-priority data transfer, and multipath data
transfer. Our work demonstrates that the diverse
requirements of a number of network applications can
be achieved using a practical application-level
approach built on top of TCP, and intelligently
utilizing the internal mechanisms in TCP can
dramatically simplify the design of an
application-level service.
This book is for both researchers and practitioners
in the field, and graduate students who are
interested in computer networks.