Hi, I'll begin by apologizing for asking what I'm quite sure is a terribly stupid question to many of you.
The question is: It has long been known that media data can have different levels of importance. Simply put, if packet #1 from a single source contains parts of a video's I-Frame and packet #2 contains only parts of B-Frames, and both end up in the same queue, controlled by an AQM (for instance), it would be better for the video stream if packet #2 would be dropped rather than packet #1. There is nothing new with this story; it's not hard to find research papers that document various variations of this theme, showing benefits in video quality. My question is, why is none of this happening? Is it because DSCP values are typically associated with sources, and hence, marking packet #2 as "less" important would put the source at the risk of having its packets less important than not only its own other packets, but anybody else's? But there is equipment that does per-connection stuff, and such things could probably better be done near the edges, where the bottleneck typically is... so if that's the whole issue, we could define DSCP values that mean relative importance *within the same five-tuple only*. Surely that has been thought about and probably proposed by folks before, so what happened? Why isn't it done? Or is it because per-five-tuple-functionality in the network is regarded as being too costly, and not encouraged, and hence not standardized? I'm just trying to understand the reasons for this particular long-standing difference between research an reality. Cheers, Michael
