A QoS network management system for robust and reliable multimedia services

In this paper, we introduce a practical network management system with QoS for multimedia traffic. Today, multimedia applications have evolved significantly and have become an essential part. of the Internet; In order to effectively support the newly emerging network traffic, the underlying network protocols need to be aware of the characteristics and demands of the traffic. The proposed network system is ready to address the varied characteristics of multimedia traffic and can assure a high degree of adherence to the quality of service demanded from it. Considering the need for reliable QoS services, the system is also equipped with fault tolerance capability by provisioning multiple QoS paths. Moreover, the system has been practically designed and implemented to provide "cost-effective" QoS support with respect to control overhead. It deploys measurement-based QoS path computation and call admission scheme which may be deemed ineffective for bursty multimedia traffic. However, results conclusively prove that provisioning multiple paths and utilizing them in parallel in our system not only provides high fault tolerance capability but also effectively accommodates multimedia traffic by relieving its burstiness with multiple paths. We present the architecture of the system and discuss the benefits gained for multimedia traffic.