As demand for bandwidth in networks
continues to grow, the competition between different applications and protocols
for these resources will continue to grow as well. Certain applications, such
as Voice over IP (VoIP) and Video
Conferencing, require guaranteed minima of resources so that users will not
experience unacceptable delays or dropouts during their communications. The
Internet Protocol in its currently used version 4 does not provide a formal
mechanism for applications to reserve these resources on the network. With
version 6 of IP—as well as in a number of other network protocols—the notion of
Quality of Service has been formally introduced, meaning that a mechanism to
solve this problem has been provided.
See Also:
Internet Protocol; TCP/IP.
