User centric QoS management framework and its implementation

There have been numerous proposals for managing the end-to-end Quality of Service of multimedia applications. These approaches can be categorised into two groups, namely schemes that attempt to provide service guarantees, and schemes that provide best effort service. The schemes that attempt to provide service guarantees, only have limited applicability as they require apriori knowledge of all resource requirements. In contrast, the approaches, which provide best effort service cannot provide predictable services, and use application adpativity to deal with variation in service levels. However, neither of these approaches facilitate user participation in the decision making process except at the start of the session. In this paper, we present a new QoS management framework, which is user centric, and integrates the adaptability of the application and the resource management of the system. It presents the architecture of the proposed framework, and describes the design requirements of each of these architectural components. Then the viability of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a prototype implementation of the QoS management architecture under Linux, and the use of an adaptive MPEG based video on demand application.