FLOWS: performance guarantees in best effort delivery systems

Abstract

A network-level communication abstraction called flow is discussed as a communication channel that has specific performance characteristics associated with its traffic. The underlying delivery system guarantees to meet performance requirements of a flow once it accepts a flow request. Upper layers use flows to implement transport-level protocols and high performance applications. The authors describe the concept of flows in detail and present algorithms that implement flows in a high-speed packet-switched network under development at Purdue University.<>