QoS-aware Multimedia Web Services Architecture

Due to the increasing growth of Web Services, Quality of Service (QoS) is becoming a key issue in web services community. Providers and clients need to use QoS-aware architectures to get/ensure end-to-end QoS. The QoS delivery to clients is highly affected by the web service performance itself, by the hosting platform (e.g., Application Server) and by the underlying network (e.g., Internet). Thus, even if web services together with hosting platform provide acceptable QoS, they also require sufficient available network resources to deliver end-to-end QoS. In this paper, we propose a solution approach to the problem of end-to-end QoS support for web services. Our approach rely on the utilization of a web service, called Network Resources Manager (NRM), to take care of the QoS support in the network connecting the client host and the matching web service location. NRM either relies on the network QoS capabilities (e.g., Integrated Services, Differentiated Services, Multiprotocol Label Switching), if any, or uses a measurementbased scheme to estimate the quality that can be delivered between the two locations. One of the key differentiator of our solution is that it does not require any changes to the currently used infrastructure by the users and web services providers.