RESOURCES RESERVATION IN A REACTIVE QoS SCHEME

User Services Assistant (USA) is a novel reactive QoS agent that provides facilities for managing user to user QoS in Internet environments. By being reactive, it overcomes the problems associated with QoS management schemes that have been proposed to date, such as the mapping of the QoS parameters to end system parameters, and pre-determining the optimum way of degrading/upgrading the QoS. However, for the reactive QoS scheme to be fully functional, it is necessary to provide facilities for end to end parameter negotiation, and to obtain support for resource reservation from the underlying systems. This paper provides an evaluation of the reactive QoS management paradigm, and its network resource reservation requirements. We show that reactive QoS management schemes requires sender initiated resource reservation, and if such a scheme can be provided, it can be used to provide effective and practical QoS management by using an implementation of USA over a sender initiated resource reservation scheme.