In addition to the traffic growth in the Internet, new applications and services are imposing a large variety of requirements. At the same time, the emergence of network applications on video, audio, business services, and other data ser-vices is creating an imminent demand for integration of most traffic with de-fined quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Examples of emerging network re-quirements are directly related to reliability, recoverability, and security. Al-though most of these requirements have kindled research interests in recent years, it is still unclear how to integrate them for next generation networks. To manage the increasing variety of QoS requirements, this research project pro-poses a new service model concept, called service vector, as a solution for pro-viding QoS support for a large variety of traffic classes. This concept is expected to help achieving the following objectives: a) robust differentiated service model capable of supporting fine QoS granularity; b) scalability; c) satisfaction of the users' customized end-to-end requirements; d) improved network operator revenue; e) higher utilization of the current Diffserv network model. The com-plexity and feasibility of service vectors for the next generation networks is in-vestigated, and the impact on router architectures and deployment issues are considered for the implementation of service vectors in new-generation and de-ployed routers.
