MANIA-managing awareness in networks through intelligent agents

Managing networks and distributed systems becomes every day harder than ever, because this activity is being simultaneously influenced by two distinct phenomena. First, the number of services offered is growing, ranging from more or less traditional data services (e.g. distributed file systems or intranet webs) to multimedia services (e.g. Video on Demand, Collaborative Work, Tele-Conferencing, etc). Second, and specially for multimedia services, users have now a set of complex requirements that they expect to be satisfied. In this paper we propose a framework towards an integration of user requirements into Network Management infrastructures. Therefore a dual role quality of service (QoS) framework is proposed, that allow applications to specify their QoS requirements, as well as allow management applications to handle those specifications so the appropriate management operations could be taken. The paper ends with the presentation of the management application principles and architectures suited for the proposed framework