Perceptual, considerations in a QoS framework: a fuzzy logic formulation

The concept of quality of service (QoS) in distributed multimedia systems is indelibly associated with the provision of an acceptable level of application performance. In turn this performance is itself dependent on both the perceived, subjective quality of the application as well as its robustness to network congestion. We suggest a framework for QoS management that incorporates not only classical QoS considerations, but, user preferences as well. Our approach constructs an appropriately tailored communication protocol using objective-technical judgements provided by the designer and subjective-perceptual judgements supplied by the user for intelligent decision making. Due to the nature of our problem, where these two information facets may be inconsistent, the need to apply a weight determination technique suitable to handle inconsistencies was indispensable. To this end, a fuzzy logic-based description of the problem has been developed and fuzzy programming was used to obtain a user-oriented ordering of QoS parameters