End-to-end QoS provisioning through resource adaptation

With the progression of multimedia middleware and guaranteed network services, developers are now presented with flexible frameworks for the development and deployment of distributed multimedia applications. New and more advanced applications are supporting end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees through the configuration and management of distributed resources. As an effect of the sharing of network and end-system resources across multiple clients, coupled with their dynamically changing state, the general end-to-end availability of resources in a distributed environment is variable and potentially unpredictable. Thus, the provision of QoS constrained services in a distributed environment demands carefully controlled and co-ordinated management mechanisms. In this paper we discuss the requirements for QoS adaptation mechanisms and QoS-based distributed resource management, together with our approaches to QoS adaptation and policing, with issues concerning the incorporation of these mechanisms in our recently developed Distributed Resource Management Architecture (DRMA).