Paper Review:
Integrated Services in the Internet Architecture: an Overview

Reviewer: Jie Zhou

Problem

Due to the variable queueing delays and congestion losses in current Internet, online real-time applications often do not work well. As real-time applications such as video, audio, and multimedia conferencing are broadly used, the Internet infrastructure must be modified to support real-time QoS.

Contribution

The paper proposes an extention to the Internet architecutre and protocols to provide integrated services including best-effort service, real-time service, and controlled link sharing.

Main Ideas

  • The IS model integrates the guaranteed and predictive services with controlled link-sharing, and it is designed to work well with multicast as well as unicast.
  • The proposed reference implementation framework includes four components: the packet scheduler, the admission control routine, the classifier, and the reservation setup protocol.

    Critique

    This paper provides an extended service model "IS model", and a reference implementation framework to deal with the problem of real-time applications on Internet. It covers a broad range of related issues, and suggests the solutions to them. Based on the comprehensive work of this paper, I rate it at 4 (significant contribution).

    I feel this paper is quite convincing. The authors give clear explanation for each assumption or explanation. Besides, a code package has been implemented which realizes all the proposed services.

    Lession

    Diffent kinds of applications have different requirement, thus researchers should make different trade-off so as to achieve the maximum utility for each application.

    Open Question

    Is the mobility of mobile hosts essentially different from other route changes?