10.1 Introduction

There are more than 150 million hosts on the global Internet. The number of Internet users is over 513 million, worldwide [ ^[1]]. The Internet has been doubling annually since 1988. The size of the global Internet is estimated to exceed the size of the global telephone network by 2006. It is estimated that e-commerce on the Internet will reach somewhere between $1.8 T and $3.2 T U.S. dollars by 2003 [ ^[2]]. The Internet needs to provide service quality that end users require. End users expect the Internet to be accessible, reliable, secure and fast all the time irrespective of who owns it and who runs it. It is critical for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide QoS meeting end users needs.

Quality of service continues to be the number one concern of the users of Internet based services. Recent surveys and focus group studies indicate QoS to be the most serious limiting factor in Electronic-Commerce/Electronic-Business (EC/EB). Users consistently rank quality, reliability and security as very important . Internet businesses lose billions of dollars each year because of slow and failed web services. As e-business/e-commerce grows exponentially so does the quality, reliability and security concerns of both service users as well as service providers. With stock, real state and many other online commodities now selling for thousands of dollars, fast and reliable Internet exchanges are becoming increasingly important.

This part of the book focuses on the QoS aspects of Internet-based telecommunication services. It develops a...