Subject: Re: Differentiated Services working group

From: Hemant Kanakia <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Mar 1998 18:44:58 -0500

At 03:09 PM 3/1/98 -0800, Raj Yavatkar wrote:
>I agree. I am concerned that the chater seems to exclude the issue of
>end-to-end semnatics and edge interactions. I believe, it will be useful to
>include a discussion of the role of end systems, how and what signaling
>would be used by applications to take advantage of what dif-serv offers,
>and the expected end2end result.
>
>is the chater still open for further discussion?
>
>Thanks
>Raj
>
> 
I echo raj's concern. IMHO, not considering 
the impact of services being offered
vis-a-vis the role of end systems 
was what ultimately made ATM's effort
to provide additional service classes 
unacceptable to a large number
of end-users. One is likely to get 
details wrong unless at least the
disussion includes issues related to
end-to-end semantics and signalling
efforts needed to implement differentiated services.

Hemant Kanakia

---

From: Greg Minshall <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Mar 1998 11:48:58 -0800

Hi, everyone-in-the-world,

There are lots of problems that are being attacked (there are even lots of 
problems that *need* to be attacked), but not all of them are being attacked 
by diff-serv.

Diff-serv is about how to use a few bits in packet headers in order to provide 
some sort of service through a provider's network.  It is also (i assume) 
about Dave Clark's nice notion of modifying (a subset of) these bits at the 
boundary into (and possibly out of) a provider's network.

You might pretend you are operating a network, and assume that you "know" 
(through "national means", say) what level of service a given packet should be 
given as it enters your network.  How, then, do you give a high assurance that 
the packet will receive that level of service all the way through your network?

(This isn't to say that issues such as "how do hosts signal what level of 
service *they* would like to receive?" are not important.  They just aren't 
necessarily part of diff-serv, though i suspect some of these issues will be 
discussed somewhat.)

Greg