An agent-based approach for supporting quality of service in distributed multimedia systems

Quality of service (QoS) is a core issue in multimedia systems. Intuitively, QoS states how valuable the services provided by a multimedia system are. As a rule, QoS is established through negotiation between users and service providers. The negotiation involves allocation and management of resources in order to attend an expected level of quality. The process of negotiation is simple if the resources are managed by a single entity (e.g., operating system) or by a set of entities supporting a common negotiation protocol. Unfortunately, in distributed multimedia systems, negotiation and management of resources are complex tasks since resources are diversified, distributed and managed by autonomous entities. In order to minimise such difficulties, an agent-based architecture for QoS negotiation and management in distributed multimedia systems is proposed in this paper. The proposed architecture combines fixed and mobile agents that interact among themselves with the aim of establishing and maintaining a certain level of QoS. This paper also presents the current implementation stage of the proposed architecture.