How can users be induced to choose the right level of service?
The current Internet offers a single service quality: best efforts packet service. Packets are transported first-come, first-served with no guaran tee of success. Some packets may experience severe delays, while others may be dropped and never arrive. However, different kinds of data place different demands on network services. E-mail and file transfers requires 100% accuracy, but can easily tolerate delay. Real-time voice broadcasts require much higher bandwidth than file transfers, and can only tolerate minor delays, but they can tolerate significant distortion. Real time video broadcasts have very low tolerance for delay and distortion. Because of these different requirements, network routing algorithms will want to treat different types of traffic differently–giving higher priority to, say, real-time video than to e-mail or file transfer. But in order to do this, the user must truthfully indicate what type of traffic he or she is sending. If real-time video bit streams get the hig
