Optimization Issues in Quality of Service

Abstract

The advent of the World Wide Web has fundamentally changed the nature of Internet traffic. New classes of applications, such as video conferencing, Internet telephony and various forms of e-commerce have arisen, for which so-called best effort service is no longer acceptable. These new applications represent delay-sensitive traffic with specific performance requirements. The term Quality of Service (QoS) is used to describe network features that are designed to provide the better than best effort performance that is required by such applications. In this chapter, we consider QoS in the context of network design. Specifically, we focus on network design or optimization problems that address link topology, link capacity, route assignment and/or router location, and that take various performance requirements into account. In particular, solutions to these network design problems ensure that sufficient resources (e.g., bandwidth) are made available so that certain specified performance requirements (e.g., delay requirements) will be explicitly met.