QoS Assurance vs. Dynamic Adaptability for Applications

Enabling adaptability to network QoS (quality of service) is seen as a key feature for future applications. One way to approach adaptability is to build it into the network and allow applications to signal their requirements to the network. This means that resource reservation mechanisms must be available end-to-end, which is not always the case, especially on the Internet. Also, user preferences affect how the application is used. So the application must be dynamically adaptive, taking into account the application’s capabilities, the available network QoS and the user preferences. We suggest that it is possible to build practicable QoS summaries that capture all these inputs and allow dynamic adaptability.