Quality of service for networked virtual environments

A definition and measurement of quality of service for networked virtual environments (NVEs) presents many challenges, in part due to subjective and qualitative description of users' preferences for NVE-based applications. QoS can be provided, in general, as a per-application service, a network layer option, or both. Many of the proposed QoS architectures for NVE-based applications include the per-application service approach. Most of them focus on video and audio components with less emphasis on user interactions and user-level QoS. A review of architectures and approaches to QoS for NVEs identifies related issues. Those issues include user-level QoS and mapping between user and application-level QoS, as well as the relationship between application-level QoS and network-level requirements. An approach is described that, for a given user-level QoS value, provides a reductions in network requirements by optimizing task or application-level scenarios. An example based on the DIVE testbed illustrates the approach.