Quality of service for perceptual considerations: an integrated perspective

The vision of a new generation of network communication architectures, which deliver a Quality of Service based on intelligent decisions about the interactions that typically take place in a multimedia scenario, encourages researchers to look at novel ways of matching user-level requirements with parameters characterising underlying network performance. In this paper, we suggest an integrated architecture that makes use of the objectivetechnical information provided by the designer and the subjectiveperceptual information supplied by the user for intelligent decision making in the construction of communication protocols. Thus, this approach, based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process, incorporates not only classical Quality of Service considerations, but, indeed, user preferences as well. Furthermore, in keeping with the task-dependent nature consistently identified in multimedia scenarios, the suggested communication protocols also take into account the type of multimedia application, which they are transporting. Lastly, our approach also opens the possibility for such protocols to dynamically adapt based on a changing operating environment.