QoS Management-Related Tasks: Beyond Policy-Based Management

Providing QoS-guaranteed services in current installed networks is an important issue, but only deploying QoS services is not enough to guarantee their success: QoS management must also be provided. Nowadays, policy-based network management (PBNM) addresses this need, but such management is not enough either. Network managers often deal with QoS tasks that cannot be performed using only PBNM. This paper describes six important QoS management-related tasks (QoS installation, operation maintenance, discovery, monitoring, analysis and visualization) and shows solutions that can help managers proceed with these tasks. Unfortunately, these solutions are independent from each other, leading to a scenario where integration is difficult. To solve this lack of integration, QAME (QoS-Aware Management Environment) is proposed. QAME provides support to allow the execution of the defined QoS tasks in an integrated fashion.