The emphasis is not on data rates, but on quality of service guarantees enhancing current applications and creating applications that were not previously possible. Tele-immersion, for example, could accelerate the discovery of a cure by a distributed community of medical researchers. This white paper surveys issues that the I2 application effort intends to address. Establishing that list requires a dialogue among a wide community. A necessary investigation is defining user requirements for quality of service.
Electronic commerce adds transactional guarantees.
Collaborative applications demand real-time services, such as virtual reality environments with sensory feedback. Digital libraries may exploit low-latency by creating new services, such as interactive relevance feedback. Dependability and reliability are critical quality parameters for all applications. The latter provides greater flexibility, but perhaps differentiated service levels need to evolve over time given current router performance. Today, applications are typically not aware of any attributes of the underlying network.