Subject: Questions about IIS deployment

From: "Alessio Casati" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 13:55:49 +0100

Hi,

I've been reading through intserv specs and I've some questions about
the deployment of Integrated services in the Internet.
I apologize if the issues I'll be raising have already been discussed in this
list, and also if some of them are not strictly technical.

Aside from the problems the transition from the current BE-only Internet to an integrated
services Internet entails (there's no way to bypass them, of course),
there may be problems also within a fully deployed Integrated Services Internet
scenario. 

The BE nature of the Internet has allowed a fundamentally unregulated deployment and 
growth. But if different operators have to provide a global and possibly chargeable service,
I wonder whether such a paradigm may still hold.
I mean that if an end to end service entails the traversal of different operators,
if one among them misbehaves  it all ends up in the service being broken. Futhermore user 
unsatisfaction will unfairly fall over the overall end to end chain.

This raises both regulatory and technical issues. 
Focusing on the technical edge, I wonder whether the current definition of a service such as
Controlled Load can lead to some problems when facing the regulatory aspects. At
the current status of the spec much is left to implementor's choices and engineering. 
Would it be wrong to add some more constraints?

If an operator uses equipment with a loose admission control, maybe it can gain more earnings 
(provided that nobody can be sure that it's the source of some (light) underperformance users can 
experience along their end to end chain). This cannot happen in the GS framework, because when an 
operator admits a reservation request (i.e. every node in its administrative domain receiving the 
request has sufficient resources), it commits itself to deliver an upperbounded delay, and there's 
some mechanism to find out if it's really delivered.

In view of what here above written, does anybody deem it necessary to define, for instance, an 
agreed upon admission control algorithm and criterion for CLS (I mention admission control here, 
but take it as a placeholder for any other functionality which can make sense there)? Do you 
alternatively think that everything is going to work well, because everybody will be driven by 
similar optimum engineering decisions? Will some auditing of operators' performance be in order, 
and do you think it would make sense to define some auditing mechanism here? Or is QoS routing the
solution to this problem?

Thanks for your attention.

         Alessio Casati