QoS Provisionig And Control In Real-Time Interactive Multimedia Communications Using Digital Watermarking

In the last decade, there has been an explosive growth in mobile computing technology and obviously an increase demand for platforms with multimedia application support. The desire to be connected “any-time, any-where and any-way” has led to an increasing array of heterogeneous systems, multimedia applications, devices, and service providers. In response to this issue, quality of service (QoS) is designed to hide low-level application variation and provide necessary service guarantees. In this contribution, motivation and operating guidelines for QoS assessment in real-time interactive multimedia communications are discussed and investigated. In particular, we consider the end-to-end service quality methodologies proposing a QoS evaluation technique by means of an unconventional use of fragile watermarking. Thus, by knowing the end-to-end QoS, it is possible to adopt optimal pricing strategies in terms of the QoS profiling for all the active users involved in the communication.