Humble beginnings, uncertain end: getting the internet to provide performance guarantees

Abstract

One of the pioneering efforts to obtain guaranteed performance from the Internet was born out of sheer curiosity. The question "Can it be done, and, if so, how?" came unexpectedly to the mind of a researcher who had never been active in the field of networking, and kept tormenting him until it became a personal challenge. Also due to many other researchers (with a lot more networking credentials), the topic was for several years quite a popular one in the community, and various protocols were designed, some even implemented, to incarnate some of the results of research. Will any of those protocols ever be deployed on the Internet? Only the future will tell.