Enabling a Low-Delay Internet Service Via Built-In Performance Incentives

The single best-effort service of the Internet struggles to accommodate divergent needs of different distributed applications. Numerous alternative network architectures have been proposed to offer diversified network services. These innovative solutions failed to gain wide deployment primarily due to economic and legacy issues rather than technical shortcomings. The authors' paper presents a new simple paradigm for network service differentiation that accounts explicitly for the multiplicity of Internet service providers and users as well as their economic interests in environments with partly deployed new services. Their key idea is to base the service differentiation on performance itself, rather than price.