A linguistic decision support model for QoS priorities in networking

Networking resources and technologies are mission-critical in organizations, companies, universities, etc. Their relevance implies the necessity of including tools for Quality of Service (QoS) that assure the performance of such critical services. To address this problem and guarantee a sufficient bandwidth transmission for critical applications/services, different strategies and QoS tools based on the administrator's knowledge may be used. However it is common that network administrators might have a nonrealistic view about the needs of users and organizations. Consequently it seems convenient to take into account such users' necessities for traffic prioritization even though they could involve uncertainty and subjectivity. This paper proposes a linguistic decision support model for traffic prioritization in networking, which uses a group decision making process that gathers user's needs in order to improve organizational productivity. This model manages the inherent uncertainty, imprecision and vagueness of users' necessities, modeling the information by means of linguistic information and offering a flexible framework that provides multiple linguistic scales to the experts, according to their degree of knowledge. Thereby, this decision support model will consist of two processes: (i) A linguistic decision analysis process that evaluates and assesses priorities for QoS of the network services according to users and organizations' necessities. (ii) A priority assignment process that sets up the network traffic in agreement with the previous values.