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                   B O S T O N   U N I V E R S I T Y
                      Computer Science Department
                          C O L L O Q U I U M
                     Wednesday, November 8, 3:00 PM 
                       (Coffee served at 2:45PM)
                         Seminar Room / MCS 135


 How to Achieve Quality on the Internet: A Debate between QoS and CDD
 
 Solom Heddaya
 CTO
 InfoLibria Inc.  
 
 In 1996, the US Internet backbone bisection bandwidth was 5 Gigabits
 per second (Gbps). Today it is estimated at 1,500 Gbps and projected
 to grow to 15,000 Gbps by 2003. Nevertheless, the quality of
 individual flows remains insufficient to support consistently fast Web
 page downloads, let alone more-demanding applications such
 as multimedia streams and interactive applications.
 
 Two fundamentally different approaches to this problem are emerging.
 QoS ensures end-to-end quality for application flows that require it,
 by managing existing capacity via resource reservations and admission
 control. By contrast, Content Distribution and Delivery (CDD) places
 distributed processing and storage in the network to expand the
 network's delivery capacity 100-fold, and its response time by another
 10-fold.
 
 This talk will outline and contrast these two approaches, and identify
 how they can be complementary in the short and medium-term.
 Connections with other technologies such as multicast and
 fiber-optics, will be drawn, so as to paint a vision of how Internet
 architecture is likely to evolve over the long-term.
 
 [This talk will recapitulate a debate held under the same title at the
 Next-Generation Networking conference (NGN-2000) on 11/1/00 in
 Washington, DC. The debaters were Surya Panditi, CEO of Avici Systems,
 and the speaker.]


Host: Ibrahim Matta (matta@cs.bu.edu)