Sally Floyd, Mark Allman. Comments on the Usefulness of Simple Best-Effort Traffic, July 2008. RFC 5290.
Status: Informational.
TXT | Errata

Abstract:

This document presents some observations on "simple best-effort traffic", defined loosely for the purposes of this document as Internet traffic that is not covered by Quality of Service (QOS) mechanisms, congestion-based pricing, cost-based fairness, admissions control, or the like. One observation is that simple best-effort traffic serves a useful role in the Internet, and is worth keeping. While differential treatment of traffic can clearly be useful, we believe such mechanisms are useful as *adjuncts* to simple best- effort traffic, not as *replacements* of simple best-effort traffic. A second observation is that for simple best-effort traffic, some form of rough flow-rate fairness is a useful goal for resource allocation, where "flow-rate fairness" is defined by the goal of equal flow rates for different flows over the same path.

BibTeX:

@misc{FA08,
    author =        "Sally Floyd and Mark Allman",
    title  =        "{Comments on the Usefulness of Simple Best-Effort Traffic}",
    year   =        2008,
    month  =        jul,
    note   =        "RFC 5290",
}