QUALITY OF SERVICE IN MULTIMEDIA NETWORKS

Today’s networks struggle providing a data transmission service of sufficient quali ty. The demands imposed on the networks by current applications, such as multimedia applications, cannot easily be met. Error-free data delivery within tight time constraints are required by some applications in order to provide user satisfaction. However, most networks do not naturally provide means for the specification and provision of the quality of service (QoS) required by these applications. This paper investigates three available approaches to provide various degrees of QoS: the approach taken by ATM, reservation-based hard QoS guarantees and the soft-QoS approach used with differentiated services.