Differentiated Treatment of Internet Traffic

Differentiated treatment of Internet Access Service traffic has been a subject of debate and regulatory scrutiny. In February 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted Open Internet rules that address paid prioritization as well as other topics. This report touches on a broad range of questions associated with differentiation, but is not intended to address or analyze the economic, legal, regulatory, or public policy issues that the differentiated treatment of Internet access service traffic may raise, focusing instead on the technical issues. The data transmitted across the networks that make up the Internet is formatted as packets, which contain information payloads encapsulated within one or more headers. These headers provide the information needed to deliver the packets to their destinations. As these packets travel across networks, they contend with other packets for network resources. The simplest way to handle this contention would be on a first come, first served basis (also known as First In First Out, or FIFO).

In practice, however, network operators make many exceptions to FIFO, using the packet header information to classify packets into flows and treating those flows differently, for example rearranging the order or the timing with which packets are sent, or sending them along different network paths. This is done for various reasons, including meeting service level agreement (SLA) guarantees and selecting paths for traffic from different applications, among other things. Differentiated treatment of traffic can also contribute both to the efficiency of a network and to the predictability of the manner in which network resources are shared. The ability to treat traffic differentially has been built into Internet protocols from the beginning but has not been deployed end-to-end due to a number of issues.


Differentiated Treatment of Internet Traffic