Resource Management for Distributed Multimedia Applications

In this paper we present and discuss our approach to resource management for distributed multimedia applications. We assert that resource management is important to meet the diverse Quality of Service (QoS) needs of multimedia communications in future telecommunications networks, for both the individual communications session and for the network as a whole. Management, in our work, involves monitoring and control of resources involved in the entire end-to-end progression of setting up, maintaining and closing down a session. It encompasses short time scale control and signalling as well as longer time scale issues of deployment of resources. We are developing a QoS-based architecture which consists of a set of hierarchical regions from application through transport and network layers to the physical communications paths and the end-system resources. We expect the innovations of the work to be the following; the definition of QoS-based service interfaces to each region in the architecture; a QoS manager that maps application requests into managed end-to-end services; and a signalling system that provides the engineering basis for resource management.