Issues in Managing Soft QoS Requirements in Distributed Systems Using a Policy-Based Framework

We address the problem of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for multimedia applications (e.g., distance education, telemedicine, electronic commerce). These applications need to be able to co-exist with more traditional applications for transaction and data processing and have soft real-time requirements. Unlike most other work in QoS management, we provide a framework that does not require users or application developers to have detailed knowledge of the resources needed and resource scheduling and allocation techniques in use. These underlying details are effectively hidden. In this paper, we describe our strategy, an architecture of services to support the strategy and a prototype.