Beyond technology: the missing pieces for QoS success

Years of research on QoS architectures for IP networks have delivered sophisticated proposals, which have nevertheless not found broad commercial use. The reasons are not lack of technical soundness or insurmountable technological complexity, but insufficient attention to other, non-QoS-specific matters. First among them is the lack of a commercialization model for the Internet together with the necessary accounting and charging architecture. Another crucial issue is the assurance of end-to-end QoS coherence in the face of multiple intervening parties (network and content providers, users). Furthermore, the practical requirements imposed by those parties to any successful QoS architecture have not been fully taken into account: Ease of management, simplicity and measurable guarantees are some of the main ones. In this paper, the overall constraints on and conditions for the successful deployment of QoS in IP networks are analyzed and some possible directions explored.