There is no good standardized way for applications to signal the network for services, like QoS, that the app wants applied to their packets. Typically it is some sys admin that decides how these services and resources are partitioned and configures their control. Enter FAST - which is being developed at the IETF.

Tom Herbert says FAST is secure, expressive, stateless, not spoofable, deployable, efficient, dynamic, requires no DPI, doesn’t disclose internals of the network, and works with any transport protocol. FAST tickets are attached to packets to describe the service requests and grants of admission that the application has requested from the network. Tickets are sent in IPv6 Hop-by-Hop options.

Tom will provide rationale why Hop-by-Hop options are really the best choice compared to proposed alternatives despite concerns about them being dropped in the Internet. Eventually Tom will present the kernel patches and tie them to how applications will use the provided infra to request for tickets and how they are granted, how they're set and transmitted in packets, how a network node can process the FAST ticket in the packet and apply network mechanisms to satisfy the service requests.

cheers, jamal

PS: 5 more days left for early-bird registration. visit netdevconf.info/0x17/registration