Best Effort Quality-of-Service

We show that the fundamental problems in providing quality-of-service in the existing Internet architecture has been the assumption that a single, "best" path from source to destination is adequate for any communications requirements of the network. We present a new, best-effort architecture for providing quality-of-service in the Internet based on the use of the "best set of paths" to destinations. We show that this set of paths is well defined, can be efficiently computed, and present an approach to efficiently implement this new, best-effort quality- of-service architecture.