RFC 1363 (rfc1363) - Page 1 of 20

A Proposed Flow Specification

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Network Working Group                                     C. Partridge
Request for Comments: 1363                                         BBN
                                                        September 1992


                     A Proposed Flow Specification

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard.  Distribution of this memo is
   unlimited.

Abstract

   A flow specification (or "flow spec") is a data structure used by
   internetwork hosts to request special services of the internetwork,
   often guarantees about how the internetwork will handle some of the
   hosts' traffic.  In the future, hosts are expected to have to request
   such services on behalf of distributed applications such as
   multimedia conferencing.

   The flow specification defined in this memo is intended for
   information and possible experimentation (i.e., experimental use by
   consenting routers and applications only).  This RFC is a product of
   the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF).

Introduction

   The Internet research community is currently studying the problems of
   supporting a new suite of distributed applications over
   internetworks.  These applications, which include multimedia
   conferencing, data fusion, visualization, and virtual reality, have
   the property that they require the distributed system (the collection
   of hosts that support the applications along with the internetwork to
   which they are attached) be able to provide guarantees about the
   quality of communication between applications.  For example, a video
   conference may require a certain minimum bandwidth to be sure that
   the video images are delivered in a timely way to all recipients.

   One way for the distributed system to provide guarantees is for hosts
   to negotiate with the internetwork for rights to use a certain part
   of the internetwork's resources.  (An alternative is to have the
   internetwork infer the hosts' needs from information embedded in the
   data traffic each host injects into the network.  Currently, it is
   not clear how to make this scheme work except for a rather limited
   set of traffic classes.)




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