A Market-Based Approach to Allocating QoS for Multimedia Applications

Allocating quality of service (QoS) has been a focus of recent work on distributed multimedia systems and networks. This paper explores a decentralized approach that allocates QoS through a dynamic market. In our approach, each agent makes decisions according to its local knowledge and interests, and prices adjust to dear the market in each resource. Dynamic changes in agent needs and network status cause the agents to revise their decisions continually. The market prices reflect system-wide values, inducing agents to produce and consume appropriate amounts of the vaxious resources. We describe a market model for allocating bandwidth in aa actual networked meeting environment called Free Walk. Experiments reveal the responsiveness of the maxket-based approach to dynamic conditions in allocating QoS for multimedia network applications.