A scalable solution for engineering streaming traffic in the future Internet

As traffic on the Internet continues to grow exponentially, there is a real need to solve scalability and traffic engineering simultaneously - specifically, without using over-provisioning in order to accommodate streaming media traffic. One of the threats to the current operation stability of the Internet comes from UDP-based streaming media applications, such as Skype (which is currently doubling every 6-month) today and video services in the near future. This paper shows how the Internet can benefit from pipeline forwarding in order to: (i) construct ultra-scalable IP switches, (ii) provide predictable quality of service for UDP-based streaming applications, while (iii) preserving elastic TCP-based traffic as is, i.e., without affecting any existing best-effort applications. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.