Quality of service management for distributed multimedia applications

Abstract

Modern distributed multimedia applications will place dynamically changing demands on the services provide by the host systems and the communications networks. Furthermore, the services offered by the communication networks will also vary, as mobile systems become more widely used. It is clear that, under these conditions, the requirements of the applications can only be satisfied with the unified management of end-to-end QoS. However, current management frameworks are not suitable for QoS management. Moreover, the current operating systems and communication protocol architectures are not suited for dealing with time constrained transfer of data that will be required by the new generation of applications and networks. In this paper, we present a QoS management framework and an implementation architecture that will enable the development of systems capable of satisfying the dynamic requirements of distributed multimedia applications.