Network Working Group                                         C. Bormann
Request for Comments: 2689                       Universitaet Bremen TZI
Category: Informational                                   September 1999


         Providing Integrated Services over Low-bitrate Links

Status of this Memo

  This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
  not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
  memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

  Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

  This document describes an architecture for providing integrated
  services over low-bitrate links, such as modem lines, ISDN B-
  channels, and sub-T1 links.  It covers only the lower parts of the
  Internet Multimedia Conferencing Architecture [1]; additional
  components required for application services such as Internet
  Telephony (e.g., a session initiation protocol) are outside the scope
  of this document.  The main components of the architecture are: a
  real-time encapsulation format for asynchronous and synchronous low-
  bitrate links, a header compression architecture optimized for real-
  time flows, elements of negotiation protocols used between routers
  (or between hosts and routers), and announcement protocols used by
  applications to allow this negotiation to take place.

1.  Introduction

  As an extension to the "best-effort" services the Internet is well-
  known for, additional types of services ("integrated services") that
  support the transport of real-time multimedia information are being
  developed for, and deployed in the Internet.  Important elements of
  this development are:

  -  parameters for forwarding mechanisms that are appropriate for
     real-time information [11, 12],

  -  a setup protocol that allows establishing special forwarding
     treatment for real-time information flows (RSVP [4]),

  -  a transport protocol for real-time information (RTP/RTCP [6]).




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RFC 2689       Integrated Services over Low-bitrate Links September 1999


  In addition to these elements at the network and transport levels of
  the Internet Multimedia Conferencing Architecture [1], further
  components are required to define application services such as
  Internet Telephony, e.g., protocols for session initiation and
  control.  These components are outside the scope of this document.

  Up to now, the newly developed services could not (or only very
  inefficiently) be used over forwarding paths that include low-bitrate
  links such as 14.4, 33.6, and 56 kbit/s modems, 56 and 64 kbit/s ISDN
  B-channels, or even sub-T1 links.  The encapsulation formats used on
  these links are not appropriate for the simultaneous transport of
  arbitrary data and real-time information that has to meet stringent
  delay requirements.  Transmission of a 1500 byte packet on a 28.8
  kbit/s modem link makes this link unavailable for the transmission of
  real-time information for about 400 ms.  This adds a worst-case delay
  that causes real-time applications to operate with round-trip delays
  on the order of at least a second -- unacceptable for real-time
  conversation.  In addition, the header overhead associated with the
  protocol stacks used is prohibitive on low-bitrate links, where
  compression down to a few dozen bytes per real-time information
  packet is often desirable.  E.g., the overhead of at least 44
  (4+20+8+12) bytes for HDLC/PPP, IP, UDP, and RTP completely
  overshadows typical audio payloads such as the 19.75 bytes needed for
  a G.723.1 ACELP audio frame -- a 14.4 kbit/s link is completely
  consumed by this header overhead alone at 40 real-time frames per
  second total (i.e., at 25 ms packetization delay for one stream or 50
  ms for two streams, with no space left for data, yet).  While the
  header overhead can be reduced by combining several real-time
  information frames into one packet, this increases the delay incurred
  while filling that packet and further detracts from the goal of
  real-time transfer of multi-media information over the Internet.

  This document describes an approach for addressing these problems.
  The main components of the architecture are:

  -  a real-time encapsulation format for asynchronous and synchronous
     low-bitrate links,

  -  a header compression architecture optimized for real-time flows,

  -  elements of negotiation protocols used between routers (or between
     hosts and routers), and

  -  announcement protocols used by applications to allow this
     negotiation to take place.






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2.  Design Considerations

  The main design goal for an architecture that addresses real-time
  multimedia flows over low-bitrate links is that of minimizing the
  end-to-end delay.  More specifically, the worst case delay (after
  removing possible outliers, which are equivalent to packet losses
  from an application point of view) is what determines the playout
  points selected by the applications and thus the delay actually
  perceived by the user.

  In addition, any such architecture should obviously undertake every
  attempt to maximize the bandwidth actually available to media data;
  overheads must be minimized.

  An important component of the integrated services architecture is the
  provision of reservations for real-time flows.  One of the problems
  that systems on low-bitrate links (routers or hosts) face when
  performing admission control for such reservations is that they must
  translate the bandwidth requested in the reservation to the one
  actually consumed on the link.  Methods such as data compression
  and/or header compression can reduce the requirements on the link,
  but admission control can only make use of the reduced requirements
  in its calculations if it has enough information about the data
  stream to know how effective the compression will be.  One goal of
  the architecture therefore is to provide the integrated services
  admission control with this information.  A beneficial side effect
  may be to allow the systems to perform better compression than would
  be possible without this information.  This may make it worthwhile to
  provide this information even when it is not intended to make a
  reservation for a real-time flow.

3.  The Need for a Concerted Approach

  Many technical approaches come to mind for addressing these problems,
  in particular a new form of low-delay encapsulation to address delay
  and header compression methods to address overhead.  This section
  shows that these techniques should be combined to solve the problem.

3.1.  Real-Time Encapsulation

  The purpose of defining a real-time link-layer encapsulation protocol
  is to be able to introduce newly arrived real-time packets into the
  link-layer data stream without having to wait for the currently
  transmitted (possibly large) packet to end.  Obviously, a real-time
  encapsulation must be part of any complete solution as the problem of
  delays induced by large frames on the link can only be solved on this
  layer.




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  To be able to switch to a real-time packet quickly in an interface
  driver, it is first necessary to identify packets that belong to
  real-time flows.  This can be done using a heuristic approach (e.g.,
  favor the transmission of highly periodic flows of small packets
  transported in IP/UDP, or use the IP precedence fields in a specific
  way defined within an organization).  Preferably, one also could make
  use of a protocol defined for identifying flows that require special
  treatment, i.e. RSVP.  Of the two service types defined for use with
  RSVP now, the guaranteed service will only be available in certain
  environments; for this and various other reasons, the service type
  chosen for many adaptive audio/video applications will most likely be
  the controlled-load service.  Controlled-load does not provide
  control parameters for target delay; thus it does not unambiguously
  identify those packet streams that would benefit most from being
  transported in a real-time encapsulation format.  This calls for a
  way to provide additional parameters in integrated services flow
  setup protocols to control the real-time encapsulation.

  Real-time encapsulation is not sufficient on its own, however: Even
  if the relevant flows can be appropriately identified for real-time
  treatment, most applications simply cannot operate properly on low-
  bitrate links with the header overhead implied by the combination of
  HDLC/PPP, IP, UDP, and RTP, i.e. they absolutely require header
  compression.

3.2.  Header Compression

  Header compression can be performed in a variety of elements and at a
  variety of levels in the protocol architecture.  As many vendors of
  Internet Telephony products for PCs ship applications, the approach
  that is most obvious to them is to reduce overhead by performing
  header compression at the application level, i.e. above transport
  protocols such as UDP (or actually by using a non-standard,
  efficiently coded header in the first place).

  Generally, header compression operates by installing state at both
  ends of a path that allows the receiving end to reconstruct
  information omitted at the sending end.  Many good techniques for
  header compression (RFC 1144, [2]) operate on the assumption that the
  path will not reorder the frames generated.  This assumption does not
  hold for end-to-end compression; therefore additional overhead is
  required for resequencing state changes and for compressed packets
  making use of these state changes.

  Assume that a very good application level header compression solution
  for RTP flows could be able to save 11 out of the 12 bytes of an RTP
  header [3].  Even this perfect solution only reduces the total header
  overhead by 1/4.  It would have to be deployed in all applications,



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  even those that operate on systems that are attached to higher-
  bitrate links.

  Because of this limited effectiveness, the AVT group that is
  responsible for RTP within the IETF has decided to not further pursue
  application level header compression.

  For router and IP stack vendors, the obvious approach is to define
  header compression that can be negotiated between peer routers.

  Advanced header compression techniques now being defined in the IETF
  [2] certainly can relieve the link from significant parts of the
  IP/UDP overhead (i.e., most of 28 of the 44 bytes mentioned above).

  One of the design principles of the new IP header compression
  developed in conjunction with IPv6 is that it stops at layers the
  semantics of which cannot be inferred from information in lower layer
  (outer) headers.  Therefore, this header compression technique alone
  cannot compress the data that is contained within UDP packets.

  Any additional header compression technique runs into a problem: If
  it assumes specific application semantics (i.e., those of RTP and a
  payload data format) based on heuristics, it runs the risk of being
  triggered falsely and (e.g. in case of packet loss) reconstructing
  packets that are catastrophically incorrect for the application
  actually being used.  A header compression technique that can be
  operated based on heuristics but does not cause incorrect
  decompression even if the heuristics failed is described in [7]; a
  companion document describes the mapping of this technique to PPP
  [10].

  With all of these techniques, the total IP/UDP/RTP header overhead
  for an audio stream can be reduced to two bytes per packet.  This
  technology need only be deployed at bottleneck links; high-speed
  links can transfer the real-time streams without routers or switches
  expending CPU cycles to perform header compression.

4.  Principles of Real-Time Encapsulation for Low-Bitrate Links

  The main design goal for a real-time encapsulation is to minimize the
  delay incurred by real-time packets that become available for sending
  while a long data packet is being sent.  To achieve this, the
  encapsulation must be able to either abort or suspend the transfer of
  the long data packet.  As an additional goal is to minimize the
  overhead required for the transmission of packets from periodic
  flows, this strongly argues for being able to suspend a packet, i.e.
  segment it into parts between which the real-time packets can be
  transferred.



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4.1.  Using existing IP fragmentation

  Transmitting only part of a packet, to allow higher-priority traffic
  to intervene and then resuming its transmission later on, is a kind
  of fragmentation.  Fragmentation is an existing functionality of the
  IP layer: An IPv4 header already contains fields that allow a large
  IP datagram to be fragmented into small parts.  A sender's "real-time
  PPP" implementation might simply indicate a small MTU to its IP stack
  and thus cause all larger datagrams to be fragmented down to a size
  that allows the access delay goals to be met (this assumes that the
  IP stack is able to priority-tag fragments, or that the PPP
  implementation is able to correlate the fragments to the initial one
  that carries the information relevant for prioritizing, or that only
  initial fragments can be high-priority).  (Also, a PPP implementation
  can negotiate down the MTU of its peer, causing the peer to fragment
  to a small size, which might be considered a crude form of
  negotiating an access delay goal with the peer system -- if that
  system supports priority queueing at the fragment level.)

  Unfortunately, a full, 20 byte IP header is needed for each fragment
  (larger when IP options are used).  This limits the minimum size of
  fragments that can be used without too much overhead.  (Also, the
  size of non-final fragments must be a multiple of 8 bytes, further
  limiting the choice.)  With path MTU discovery, IP level
  fragmentation causes TCP implementations to use small MSSs -- this
  further increases the per-packet overhead to 40 bytes per fragment.

  In any case, fragmentation at the IP level persists on the path
  further down to the datagram receiver, increasing the transmission
  overheads and router load throughout the network.  With its high
  overhead and the adverse effect on the Internet, IP level
  fragmentation can only be a stop-gap mechanism when no other
  fragmentation protocol is available in the peer implementation.

4.2.  Link-Layer Mechanisms

  Cell-oriented multiplexing techniques such as ATM that introduce
  regular points where cells from a different packet can be
  interpolated are too inefficient for low-bitrate links; also, they
  are not supported by chips used to support the link layer in low-
  bitrate routers and host interfaces.










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  Instead, the real-time encapsulation should as far as possible make
  use of the capabilities of the chips that have been deployed.  On
  synchronous lines, these chips support HDLC framing; on asynchronous
  lines, an asynchronous variant of HDLC that usually is implemented in
  software is being used.  Both variants of HDLC provide a delimiting
  mechanism to indicate the end of a frame over the link.  The obvious
  solution to the segmentation problem is to combine this mechanism
  with an indication of whether the delimiter terminates or suspends
  the current packet.

  This indication could be in an octet appended to each frame
  information field; however, seven out of eight bits of the octet
  would be wasted.  Instead, the bit could be carried at the start of
  the next frame in conjunction with multiplexing information (PPP
  protocol identifier etc.) that will be required here anyway.  Since
  the real-time flows will in general be periodic, this multiplexing
  information could convey (part of) the compressed form of the header
  for the packet.  If packets from the real-time flow generally are of
  constant length (or have a defined maximum length that is often
  used), the continuation of the suspended packet could be immediately
  attached to it, without expending a further frame delimiter, i.e.,
  the interpolation of the real-time packet would then have zero
  overhead.  Since packets from low-delay real-time flows generally
  will not require the ability to be further suspended, the
  continuation bit could be reserved for the non-real-time packet
  stream.

  One real-time encapsulation format with these (and other) functions
  is described in ITU-T H.223 [13], the multiplex used by the H.324
  modem-based videophone standard [14].  It was investigated whether
  compatibility could be achieved with this specification, which will
  be used in future videophone-enabled (H.324 capable) modems.
  However, since the multiplexing capabilities of H.223 are limited to
  15 schedules (definitions of sequences of packet types that can be
  identified in a multiplex header), for general Internet usage a
  superset or a more general encapsulation would have been required.
  Also, a PPP-style negotiation protocol was needed instead of using
  (and necessarily extending) ITU-T H.245 [15] for setting the
  parameters of the multiplex.  In the PPP context, the interactions
  with the encapsulations for data compression and link layer
  encryption needed to be defined (including operation in the presence
  of padding).  But most important, H.223 requires synchronous HDLC
  chips that can be configured to send frames without an attached CRC,
  which is not possible with all chips deployed in commercially
  available routers; so complete compatibility was unachievable.






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  Instead of adopting H.223, it was decided to pursue an approach that
  is oriented towards compatibility both with existing hardware and
  existing software (in particular PPP) implementations.  The next
  subsection groups these implementations according to their
  capabilities.

4.3.  Implementation models

  This section introduces a number of terms for types of
  implementations that are likely to emerge.  It is important to have
  these different implementation models in mind as there is no single
  approach that fits all models best.

4.3.1.  Sender types

  There are two fundamental approaches to real-time transmission on
  low-bitrate links:

  Sender type 1
     The PPP real-time framing implementation is able to control the
     transmission of each byte being transmitted with some known,
     bounded delay (e.g., due to FIFOs).  For example, this is
     generally true of PC host implementations, which directly access
     serial interface chips byte by byte or by filling a very small
     FIFO.  For type 1 senders, a suspend/resume type approach will be
     typically used: When a long frame is to be sent, the attempt is to
     send it undivided; only if higher priority packets come up during
     the transmission will the lower-priority long frame be suspended
     and later resumed.  This approach allows the minimum variation in
     access delay for high-priority packets; also, fragmentation
     overhead is only incurred when actually needed.

  Sender type 2
     With type 2 senders, the interface between the PPP real-time
     framing implementation and the transmission hardware is not in
     terms of streams of bytes, but in terms of frames, e.g., in the
     form of multiple (prioritized) send queues directly supported by
     hardware.  This is often true of router systems for synchronous
     links, in particular those that have to support a large number of
     low-bitrate links.  As type 2 senders have no way to suspend a
     frame once it has been handed down for transmission, they
     typically will use a queues-of-fragments approach, where long
     packets are always split into units that are small enough to
     maintain the access delay goals for higher-priority traffic.
     There is a trade-off between the variation in access delay
     resulting from a large fragment size and the overhead that is
     incurred for every long packet by choosing a small fragment size.




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4.3.2.  Receiver types

  Although the actual work of formulating transmission streams for
  real-time applications is performed at the sender, the ability of the
  receiver to immediately make use of the information received depends
  on its characteristics:

  Receiver type 1
     Type 1 receivers have full control over the stream of bytes
     received within PPP frames, i.e., bytes received are available
     immediately to the PPP real-time framing implementation (with some
     known, bounded delay e.g. due to FIFOs etc.).

  Receiver type 2
     With type 2 receivers, the PPP real-time framing implementation
     only gets hold of a frame when it has been received completely,
     i.e., the final flag has been processed (typically by some HDLC
     chip that directly fills a memory buffer).

4.4.  Conclusion

  As a result of the diversity in capabilities of current
  implementations, there are now two specifications for real-time
  encapsulation: One, the multi-class extension to the PPP multi-link
  protocol, is providing the solution for the queues-of-fragments
  approach by extending the single-stream PPP multi-link protocol by
  multiple classes [8].  The other encapsulation, PPP in a real-time
  oriented HDLC-like framing, builds on this specification end extends
  it by a way to dynamically delimit multiple fragments within one HDLC
  frame [9], providing the solution for the suspend/resume type
  approach.

5.  Principles of Header Compression for Real-Time Flows

  A good baseline for a discussion about header compression is in the
  new IP header compression specification that was designed in
  conjunction with the development of IPv6 [2].  The techniques used
  there can reduce the 28 bytes of IPv4/UDP header to about 6 bytes
  (depending on the number of concurrent streams); with the remaining 4
  bytes of HDLC/PPP overhead and 12 bytes for RTP the total header
  overhead can be about halved but still exceeds the size of a G.723.1
  ACELP frame.  Note that, in contrast to IP header compression, the
  environment discussed here assumes the existence of a full-duplex PPP
  link and thus can rely on negotiation where IP header compression
  requires repeated transmission of the same information.  (The use of
  the architecture of the present document with link layer multicasting
  has not yet been examined.)




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  Additional design effort was required for RTP header compression.
  Applying the concepts of IP header compression, of the (at least) 12
  bytes in an RTP header, 7 bytes (timestamp, sequence, and marker bit)
  would qualify as RANDOM; DELTA encoding cannot generally be used
  without further information since the lower layer header does not
  unambiguously identify the semantics and there is no TCP checksum
  that can be relied on to detect incorrect decompression.  Only a more
  semantics-oriented approach can provide better compression (just as
  RFC 1144 can provide very good compression of TCP headers by making
  use of semantic knowledge of TCP and its checksumming method).

  For RTP packets, differential encoding of the sequence number and
  timestamps is an efficient approach for certain cases of payload data
  formats.  E.g., speech flows generally have sequence numbers and
  timestamp fields that increase by 1 and by the frame size in
  timestamp units, resp.; the CRTP (compressed RTP) specification makes
  use of this relationship by encoding these fields only when the
  second order difference is non-zero [7].

6.  Announcement Protocols Used by Applications

  As argued, the compressor can operate best if it can make use of
  information that clearly identifies real-time streams and provides
  information about the payload data format in use.

  If these systems are routers, this consent must be installed as
  router state; if these systems are hosts, it must be known to their
  networking kernels.  Sources of real-time information flows are
  already describing characteristics of these flows to their kernels
  and to the routers in the form of TSpecs in RSVP PATH messages [4].
  Since these messages make use of the router alert option, they are
  seen by all routers on the path; path state about the packet stream
  is normally installed at each of these routers that implement RSVP.
  Additional RSVP objects could be defined that are included in PATH
  messages by those applications that desire good performance over low-
  bitrate links; these objects would be coded to be ignored by routers
  that are not interested in them (class number 11bbbbbb as defined in
  [4], section 3.10).

  Note that the path state is available in the routers even when no
  reservation is made; this allows informed compression of best-effort
  traffic.  It is not quite clear, though, how path state could be torn
  down quickly when a source ceases to transmit.








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7.  Elements of Hop-By-Hop Negotiation Protocols

  The IP header compression specification attempts to account for
  simplex and multicast links by providing information about the
  compressed streams only in the forward direction.  E.g., a full
  IP/UDP header must be sent after F_MAX_TIME (currently 3 seconds),
  which is a negligible total overhead (e.g. one full header every 150
  G.723.1 packets), but must be considered carefully in scheduling the
  real-time transmissions.  Both simplex and multicast links are not
  prevailing in the low-bitrate environment (although multicast
  functionality may become more important with wireless systems); in
  this document, we therefore assume full-duplex capability.

  As compression techniques will improve, a negotiation between the two
  peers on the link would provide the best flexibility in
  implementation complexity and potential for extensibility.  The peer
  routers/hosts can decide which real-time packet streams are to be
  compressed, which header fields are not to be sent at all, which
  multiplexing information should be used on the link, and how the
  remaining header fields should be encoded.  PPP, a well-tried suite
  of negotiation protocols, is already used on most of the low-bitrate
  links and seems to provide the obvious approach.  Cooperation from
  PPP is also needed to negotiate the use of real-time encapsulations
  between systems that are not configured to automatically do so.
  Therefore, PPP options that can be negotiated at the link setup (LCP)
  phase are included in [8], [9], and [10].

8.  Security Considerations

  Header compression protocols that make use of assumptions about
  application protocols need to be carefully analyzed whether it is
  possible to subvert other applications by maliciously or
  inadvertently enabling their use.

  It is generally not possible to do significant hop-by-hop header
  compression on encrypted streams.  With certain security policies, it
  may be possible to run an encrypted tunnel to a network access server
  that does header compression on the decapsulated packets and sends
  them over an encrypted link encapsulation; see also the short mention
  of interactions between real-time encapsulation and encryption in
  section 4 above.  If the security requirements permit, a special RTP
  payload data format that encrypts only the data may preferably be
  used.








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9.  References


   [1]  Handley, M., Crowcroft, J., Bormann, C. and J. Ott, "The
        Internet Multimedia Conferencing Architecture", Work in
        Progress.

   [2]  Degermark, M., Nordgren, B. and S. Pink, "IP Header
        Compression", RFC 2507, February 1999.

   [3]  Scott Petrack, Ed Ellesson, "Framework for C/RTP: Compressed
        RTP Using Adaptive Differential Header Compression",
        contribution to the mailing list [email protected], February
        1996.

   [4]  Braden, R., Zhang, L., Berson, S., Herzog, S. and S. Jamin,
        "Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) -- Version 1 Functional
        Specification", RFC 2205, September 1997.

   [5]  Sklower, K., Lloyd, B., McGregor, G., Carr, D. and T.
        Coradetti, "The PPP Multilink Protocol (MP)", RFC 1990, August
        1996.

   [6]  Schulzrinne, H., Casner, S., Frederick, R. and V. Jacobson,
        "RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications", RFC
        1889, January 1996.

   [7]  Casner, S. and V. Jacobson, "Compressing IP/UDP/RTP Headers for
        Low-Speed Serial Links", RFC 2508, February 1999.

   [8]  Bormann, C., "The Multi-Class Extension to Multi-Link PPP", RFC
        2686, September 1999.

   [9]  Bormann, C., "PPP in a Real-time Oriented HDLC-like Framing",
        RFC 2687, September 1999.

  [10]  Engan, M., Casner, S. and C. Bormann, "IP Header Compression
        over PPP", RFC 2509, February 1999.

  [11]  Wroclawski, J.,   "Specification of the Controlled-Load Network
        Element Service", RFC 2211, September 1997.

  [12]  Shenker, S., Partridge, C. and R. Guerin.  "Specification of
        Guaranteed Quality of Service", RFC 2212, September 1997.







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RFC 2689       Integrated Services over Low-bitrate Links September 1999


  [13]  ITU-T Recommendation H.223, "Multiplexing protocol for low bit
        rate multimedia communication", International Telecommunication
        Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), March
        1996.

  [14]  ITU-T Recommendation H.324, "Terminal for low bit rate
        multimedia communication", International Telecommunication
        Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), March
        1996.

  [15]  ITU-T Recommendation H.245, "Control protocol for multimedia
        communication", International Telecommunication Union,
        Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), March 1996.

10.  Author's Address

  Carsten Bormann
  Universitaet Bremen FB3 TZI
  Postfach 330440
  D-28334 Bremen, GERMANY

  Phone: +49.421.218-7024
  Fax:   +49.421.218-7000
  EMail: [email protected]

Acknowledgements

  Much of the early discussion that led to this document was done with
  Scott Petrack and Cary Fitzgerald.  Steve Casner, Mikael Degermark,
  Steve Jackowski, Dave Oran, the other members of the ISSLL subgroup
  on low bitrate links (ISSLOW), and in particular the ISSLL WG co-
  chairs Eric Crawley and John Wroclawski have helped in making this
  architecture a reality.


















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RFC 2689       Integrated Services over Low-bitrate Links September 1999


Full Copyright Statement

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Acknowledgement

  Funding for the RFC Editor function is currently provided by the
  Internet Society.



















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