My apologies for sending it to all of you. I am not sure who is interested in the subject. Traffic prioritization as implemented by routers is built around an interface output queue. In the case where a router is connecting a fast LAN to a relatively slow line, the queue might get built on the slow line interface (in the outgoing direction) but not the other way around. In the even more special case (but probably the common one) where the traffic is asymmetric so incoming traffic is significantly larger than outgoing one, no queue will be created, and the prioritization scheme will not be operated at all. Hope this helps, Oded.
----- Forwarded message from Michael Ciavarella -----
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 9 Oct 96 07:04:08 UTC From: Hank Nussbacher <hank@ibm.net.il> To: Sean Doran <smd@cesium.clock.org>, "Dorian R. Kim" <dorian@cic.net> Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Internet II is coming...
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The reason for this is that within the university, access and use is unlimited and uncontrolled. The student and the professor have equal access from their workstation. That is why the Israeli university consortium has come up with a different solution. It is called chokepoint. A unix system that acts as a firewall/gateway. If the total access speed to the Internet is T1 then at the chokepoint one can define that port80 can use a maximum of 700kb. And one can define that telnet is guaranteed 30kb. And that 10.2.1.1 is guaranteed 128kb no matter what. This way, faculty server and faculty workstations can be given priority over student access. In addition, no one faculty member can "hog" the system. Facultycan even pay to the chokepoint to improve their service over others. An entire set of rules based on protocol and IP address can be set up and implemented. They have been running this way for the past 6 months.
How does this differ from the queuing and prioritisation features on, say, a cisco? Obviously router load is reduced by moving this type of "service" to a dedicated box, but unless you're using the UNIX box as your router to the net, how does it exert this type of control over your bandwidth? Does it drop incoming packets which exceed a (set) threshold even though they've already come over your link, or does it sit at your provider's end, in which case how do you control your outgoing traffic?
mike.. (blah. mornings.)
----- End of forwarded message from Michael Ciavarella -----