Differentiated Services
The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) working group of the IETF is standardizing differentiated IP services
The IPv4 TOS octet or the IPv6 Traffic Class octet, is used to mark a packet to receive a particular forwarding treatment (or per-hop behavior) at each network node
The scheme is entirely in line with the connectionless paradigm of IP
Everything that a router needs to know about the treatment of an IP packet is carried in the packet - there are no states or connections in the network
The group will not work on mechanisms for the identification of individual traffic flows within the network, or on signaling mechanisms to support the marking of packets