QoS-aware network design with UML

Multimedia, real-time or critical applications are among applications now relying on networks. These applications require differentiated treatments from networks. Managing QoS requests increases dramatically network complexity. Network development techniques must help designing and managing such networks by giving designers the ability to capture and integrate nonfunctional elements into the development process. Integrating these aspects early in the process development allow improving network quality. Modeling languages such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) have been applied to solve this problem. The Object Management Group (OMG) issued two Requests For Proposals (RFP) to allow capturing QoS in UML. However, these extensions lack from methodologies to solve the problem in the whole development process. In this paper, we propose an approach to develop high quality QoS-aware networks by providing means of capturing and modeling QoS requirements with UML. We also present extensions to UML to support Service Level Agreements (SLA) and criticality in QoS constraints.