Incorporation of service classes into a network architecture

This paper defines a service class and describes how a completely general service class structure can be provided by a packet switched network. It describes the difference between a handling directive and a routing metric, and defines a service class as an arbitrary collection of handling directives and routing metrics. It describes what types of distributed routing algorithms make it possible to provide for a completely general service class concept in a network, and describes the special problems to be encountered when providing for a general service class capability in a hierarchical network.