A user-centric view of QoS-aware communication

Recent technological advances coupled with new trends in using today's computing and communication infrastructure have raised new challenges in designing user interfaces for distributed multimedia applications. It has become essential to present the idea of QoS to the user, not only due to limitations of the infrastructure, but also because of the need to control user-machine interface bandwidth. In addition, a need for a tighter integration of communication and collaboration has become apparent. In this paper, we motivate the need for QoS support in the user-interface by considering shared virtual spaces, a unified communication paradigm for collaboration. We present a user-interface framework which provides the user with implicit and explicit control of quality of service, and describe our experience in designing and implementing such systems. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.