Quality of Service in a Multimedia Environment

Engineers and Managers today are co-operating in a multimedia environment buying network services from a variety of service providers. Quality of Service is an important issue for them. In order to avoid extra costs, the handling of Quality of Service has to be considered as an integral part of quality management. The International Organisation for Standardisation's ISO 9000, on the other hand, provides guidelines which can be used by manufacturers and service providers to establish a quality-conscious approach for development, testing, manufacturing and support operations. In such a case ISO 9000 certification represents a first step in the process of improving quality. Quality of Service is well-defined in the different protocol layers, but the standard ISO 9000 does not immediately help in the area of groupware, CSCW or multimedia applications. The problem is that those quality standards are more related to the quality management and not to the product or service quality itself which is the most important issue for the end user, consumer and engineer. The paper identifies major quality criteria in a multimedia environment and proposes methods how to assess them in adopting standardised methods for quality management.