An Agent-Based Adaptive QoS Management Framework and Its Applications

For distributed multimedia applications, adaptive QoS management mechanisms need to be developed to guarantee various end-to-end QoS requirements. In this paper, we propose an adaptive QoS management framework based on multi-agent systems. Adaptation to system resource changes and various user requirements is achieved by the direct or indirect collaboration of agents in the respective phases. In the flow establishment and re-negotiation phase, application agents determine the optimal resource allocation through QoS negotiations to maximize the total users' utility. In the media-transfer phase, stream agents collaborate to adjust each stream QoS reactively. In addition, personal agents help novice users specify stream QoS without any a priori knowledge on QoS. Some multimedia applications have been designed based on the proposed framework.