ODP View on Quality of Service for Open Distributed Multimedia Environments

Quality of Service (QoS) requires standardization to achieve some consistency in terminology, models and mechanisms to operate successfully in an open distributed environment. This paper embraces this standardization effort and addresses the QoS issue from an ODP perspective. The objective of this paper is to relate the multimedia QoS concepts found in the literature and ISO-QoS framework to the ODP architecture. In the computational viewpoint it details the ODP “Environment Contract” concept using the TINA Object Definition Language to express QoS characteristics for computational objects. It also gives typing rules adapted to stream interface characteristics. In the engineering viewpoint, it refines the “stream interface reference” concept to incorporate QoS specifications that are used for the exchange of QoS information in an open distributed environment. Channel establishment is then described according to the QoS phases described in the ISO-QoS Framework. Finally, an example is used to illustrate the mapping of engineering QoS parameters onto ATM.