VDM Wang, B: Priority and Realtime Data Transfer over theBest-ef

The current Internet provides a single class of best-effort service with no guarantee as to when or even whether a packet is to be delivered. Network applications, however, have a wide variety of quality of service requirements. Achieving the diverse requirements of the applications using the single-class service is a challenging task. In this book, we study providing real-time and prioritized data transfer over the best-effort Internet, emphasizing a practical application-level approach using TCP, which requires no change to the current Internet architecture and transport protocols. We exemplify this approach using three widely used applications: multimedia streaming, low-priority data transfer, and multipath data transfer. Our work demonstrates that the diverse requirements of a number of network applications can be achieved using a practical application-level approach built on top of TCP, and intelligently utilizing the internal mechanisms in TCP can dramatically simplify the design of an application-level service. This book is for both researchers and practitioners in the field, and graduate students who are interested in computer networks. ...