Management of quality of service with software agents

As distributed multimedia applications become more widely diffused, systems for quality of service (QoS) management are increasingly essential. In this paper we present an architecture for distributed QoS management based on software agents. We discuss the advantages of using agent technology in a problem inherently distributed and complex such as QoS management. Besides introducing several negotiation and coordination techniques among agents as fundamental properties for QoS management, it is argued in favor of decision making based on analytical and simulative modeling techniques. Furthermore, design and implementation issues are discussed in detail and our Java-based platform for agent-based QoS management is introduced.