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Abstract
New routers coming onto the market make it feasible for Internet service providers to offer hundreds of classes of service. Demand for differentiated quality of service over Internet-style networks is growing rapidly. A routing system must perform 3 basic tasks to deliver differentiated QOS levels: 1. classification, 2. queuing, and 3. scheduling. All of the 104-plus bits of IP header information are essential to classifying packets so that the router knows not just where to send them but also how and when. Good buffer management is essential to successful queuing and even successful network operation. New techniques permit the routing system to drop packets from the front of the queue, so the receiving end knows immediately that there is a problem.