A Survey of Quality of Service Architectures

For distributed multimedia applications, especially highly interactive applications and those relying on the transfer of continuous media, it is essential that quality of service (QoS) is configurable, predictable and maintainable system-wide, including the distributed systems platform, operating system, end-system devices, communications subsystem and network. Although researchers have addressed many isolated areas of QoS provision, until recently little attention had been paid to the development of comprehensive QoS architectures which incorporate QoS interfaces, control and management mechanisms across all architectural layers. The approach taken in this paper is, first, to set out terminology and elements of a generalised QoS framework for understanding and discussing quality of service in distributed multimedia systems; second, to review current research in the area of layer specific quality of service control and management and finally, to evaluate a number of QoS architectures that have recently emerged in the literature.