Best-effort delivery

Best Effort ( "greatest effort " ) refers to a minimalist quality of service guarantee in telecommunication networks. The operator of the network tells its users to transfer incoming inquiries as quickly as possible and in pursuit of its available resources, to the best options to use. Best effort is therefore a flat-rate quality assurance in the context of graded forms is referred to as Quality of Service.

In packet -switched networks best effort means to forward all incoming packets as long as the network is still free transmission capacity is available. A faultless and complete transmission is not guaranteed. If the capacity utilization at a certain point of the transmission path, it will inevitably lead to a congestion ( congestion ). It is left to the user or higher level protocols such as TCP (see OSI model ) to ensure, establish communication again after a temporary interruption of transmission. An example of a best-effort network is today's Internet to their Internet protocol.

• Communication technology