Design of QUANTA and an Evaluation Methodology

QUANTA (QUality of service Architecture for Native TCP/IP over ATM networks) is an end-to-end QoS architecture, which takes an application-oriented approach to address the architectural issues in providing guaranteed QoS. In this architecture we integrate different application requirements and different existent "native" QoS architectures into a single end-to-end architecture. This paper briefly reviews the fundamental QoS architectural components needed and our proposed solution to address the issues raised. We group these QoS components into application-level and protocol-level components, define the tasks of each of these components, and provide a description of the design. The application-level components include a "TLI-like" QoS interface to the application (which apart from managing the connections, maintain, manage and renegotiate QoS of different connections in an application), and a "resource reservation daemon" to manage the resources of the end-system. The protocol-level components include a "Generic Soft State (GSS)" component, a "resource management" component, and a "QoS provision component". In this paper we describe the GSS component and present a methodology to evaluate QUANTA in its success to provide to the application the requested QoS.