A Review of Quality of Service Architectures

The integration of distributed multimedia systems support into a communications architecture, including new multiservice networks, is important in realising end-to-end quality of service (QoS) guarantees. A key observation is that quality of service provides a unifying theme around which new QoS architecture can be constructed. For applications relying on the transfer of multimedia, and in particular continuous media flows, it is essential that quality of service is configurable, predictable and maintainable system-wide, including the end-system devices, communications subsystem and networks. Although researchers have addressed many isolated areas of QoS provision, until recently little attention had been paid to the development of QoS architecture which incorporates quality of service interfaces, and quality of service control and management mechanisms across all architectural layers. The approach taken in this paper is, first, to set out terminology and elements of a generalised QoS framework for understanding and discussing quality of service in distributed multimedia systems, second, to review current research in the area of layer specific quality of service control and management and finally, to evaluate a number of QoS architectures that have emerged in the literature recently.