Title: Perspectives of QoS Routing in the Internet: Prelimnary Study.
Abstract: The emerging Gigabit-per-second high-speed switching technologies and the rapid growth of the Internet enable IP_based networks to support a variety of services in particular for requests with specific QoS constraints, e.g., distributed multimedia communication applications. These requirements for services might contain a number of QoS constraints possibly including delay, delay jitter, loss ratio, bandwidth and so on, which raise new challenges for the next-generation high-speed networks. Among them, one of the key issues is QoS routing, whose basic function is to find feasible paths under a single or multiple QoS constraints. It is becoming one of the key components to build up a QoS_based network, and one of the most active areas in the Internet Community. Many recent work focus on this area by presenting a number of unicast or multicast QoS routing algorithms. However, there still lack the overall and thorough considerations, even judgements on this area. In this report, we attempt to present a thorough consideration on QoS routing as well as QoS control in the Internet. We first give the background information on QoS routing in the Internet. Then, we investigate issues involved in QoS routing in the Internet, identify basic requirements for QoS routing and examine the feasibility of QoS routing in respect of performance/cost ratio. We then present each class of QoS routing algorithms. Finally, we outline our future work on QoS routing in the Internet. As an important assumption, we believe the benefit of QoS routing overwhelms its complexity and cost under the suitable configuration and design for the next-generation high-speed networks.