Architectural Perspectives on QoS Management in Distributed Multimedia Systems

Over the past several years there has been a considerable amount of research within the field of quality of service (QoS) support for distributed multimedia systems. To date, most of the work has occurred within the context of individual architectural layers such as the distributed system platform, operating system, transport subsystem and network. Much less progress has been made in addressing the issue of overall end-to-end support for multimedia communications. In recognition of this, a number of research teams have proposed the development of QoS architectures which incorporate quality of service configurable interfaces and quality of service driven control and management mechanisms across all architectural layers. This paper examines the state-of-the-art in the development of QoS architectures. The approach taken is, initially, to present QoS terminology and a generalised QoS framework for understanding and discussing quality of service in the context of distributed multimedia systems. Following this, we consider current research in the area of layer specific quality of service support, and then, evaluate a number of QoS architectures that have recently emerged in the literature from the telecommunications, computer communications and standards communities.