RFC 5290: Comments on the Usefulness of Simple Best-Effort Traffic
In plain English — editorial summary, not part of the RFC
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. This memo provides information for the Internet community.
Document record
- Document ID
- RFC5290
- Published
- July 2008
- Authors
- S. Floyd; M. Allman
- Status
- INFORMATIONAL
- Stream
- INDEPENDENT
- Area
- —
- Pages
- 20
- Also known as
- —
Topics
Also filed under
About this page
The document record above — title, authors, date, status, stream, area, relationships, DOI and errata — is imported verbatim from the public RFC Editor index. The “in plain English” section is editorial: written by The metasystema editorial team, not part of the RFC. Where the two differ, the RFC text governs.
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