[altq 1086] [Announcement] JoBS queuing scheme for ALTQ 3.0

[Nicolas Christin <nicolas@cs.virginia.edu>]

	To everyone interested,

	After several months of efforts, I am happy to announce the first
release of the JoBS queuing discipline for ALTQ 3.0. 

What can JoBS do?
-----------------

	JoBS is a queuing discipline that provides quality-of-service (QoS) to
traffic aggregates (i.e., traffic classes). JoBS can provide any mix of
the following guarantees:

* upper bound on the delay received by a class
* upper bound on the loss rate experienced by a class
* lower bound on the throughput received by a class
* proportional delay and loss differentiation between classes

	JoBS combines buffer management and scheduling in a single algorithm.
There is no admission control or traffic shaping involved. The objective
of JoBS is to provide a queuing scheme that can enforce the
aforementioned service guarantees on a PER-HOP basis, without requiring
any communication between the participating hops. In other words, a
router running JoBS can be thought of as a "QoSbox". The network
operator sets the QoS parameters in advance, turns the QoSbox on, and
there is nothing else to do: the QoSbox does not communicate with its
peers.

How to download it?
-------------------
Instructions for downloading and installing the patches needed so that
ALTQ 3.0 can support JoBS are available at:

	http://mng.cs.virginia.edu/projects/qosbox/software.html#ALTQ

Notes
-------
This release is a BETA version. It has been thoroughly tested on FreeBSD
4.3 with Intel Pentium II and III processors, and has not exhibited any
problem. It has NOT been tested on other operating systems or
architectures. If you are running a different operating system, or a
different type of processor, please try this queuing scheme. I am very
interested in hearing from you. Please note that legal disclaimers can
be found on the web page linked above. 

More information on the project is available at 

	http://mng.cs.virginia.edu/projects/qosbox

Papers describing the JoBS queuing scheme can be found at:

	http://mng.cs.virginia.edu/projects/qosbox/docs.html

	I hope you will find this queuing scheme useful. Again, I am very
interested in hearing from anybody who is willing to try it. Questions
or comments may be sent to me by email directly, and/or (if Kenjiro
agrees) to this mailing-list.

	Thank you,

	Nicolas Christin
	Multimedia Networks Group, 
	University of Virginia, USA