A QoS scheme to address communication latency issues for critical network flows in best-effort networks using mobile agents

Flows can be mission critical; missed deadlines could result in grave consequences in systems such as hospital, military, automotive safety, and air-traffic control. It could be essential for a user to view essential information in a timely manner to make a critical decision of utmost importance. However, due to the present congestive nature of the Internet, this might not be done in a timely manner. In order to ensure that such a flow meets its goal in a timely manner, there must be a means to monitor and improve its quality of service within the network. This paper introduces a quality of service (QoS) scheme, using agents, that is scalable, congestion avoiding and controlling, network performance monitoring, congestion forecasting, diagnosing, and resource allocating and enforcing scheme aimed at providing end-to-end communication latency and jitter for these flows in a scalable, proactive and reactive manner. Unlike previous schemes, it does not do any QoS negotiation and renegotiation between the agents; thereby, not adding on to the overhead of providing QoS to these critical flows in terms of latency. It does this by combining quality of service monitoring, detection and prediction with explicit window adaptation techniques as resource allocation techniques. It also introduces a rescheduling scheme for noncritical flows within the links that share bandwidth with these critical flows. The scheme aim to create "lanes" large enough for the critical flows to flow through the soon-to-be or already congested link thereby reducing the communication latency and jitter for these flows.