Quality of Service Attributes in a Hierarchical System for Global Information Dissemination: A Preliminary Study

− This work investigates quality of service (QoS) attributes at five levels in a version of an information dissemination system called the Agile Information Control Environment (AICE). These levels are: application, information flow, infochannel, MetaNet, and network. The user is interested in application QoS. An information flow is a communication need between a source-sink pair in response to which a data item is transmitted meeting flow QoS requirements. An infochannel is a logical grouping of flows sharing the same network resources. Thus, there is the concept of infochannel QoS. The MetaNet makes a collection of networks appears to the application and infochannel levels as a single network delivering uniform end-to-end QoS. The QoS requirements that the MetaNet derives from the previous levels are translated into network QoS specifications. While application and network QoS have been discussed widely in the literature, the other QoS levels have not been described before. Dependencies among the QoS levels and methods to translate QoS between levels are explored here.