User service assistant: An end-to-end reactive QoS architecture

The rapid deployment of interactive and multimedia applications, and the increased mobility of computers leads to the need of new technical solutions in computing systems. Today, the Internet comprises a heterogeneous set of networks, with very different characteristics, especially considering the increased usage of wireless networks. Even the end systems are architecturally very different and these factors combined lead to unreliable and unpredictable performance of networked applications. One of the problems today is the question of how to manage resources and thus provide users with control over the behavior of applications, known as Quality Of Service (QoS) management. Much work has previously been done within this area, but all proposed schemes have one thing in common, a high level of complexity, which so far have prevented any of them to be fully implemented. In this paper we propose a new approach towards QoS management, in a framework we call USA, User Service Assistant. We believe that a QoS management framework should work independent of applications and available resources, and that it should react to user input rather than trying to predict the users perception of quality. We have focused on the feasibility of implementing USA, and thus we have been able to realize it with an experimental application. This paper firstly lays out the framework, describes the differences between USA and the schemes proposed today, and then describes the implementation of the framework. After that we describe the extensions to the implementation we propose to evaluate next, in order to fully assess the model. Finally we discuss the framework and its implications, and conclude on our work.