Policy-based quality of service mapping in distributed systems

An effective management is a necessary prerequisite for the economical operation of a telecommunications network or service. In particular, the quality of an offered service is an important task of the management. We refer to quality of service (QoS) as the ability to deliver services according to a set of contractual agreed parameters. All involved networks, end-systems, and to a large extent, the applications, influence end-to-end QoS. Thus, we have two quite different views on QoS: the application point of view and the network point of view. Both have to be integrated in a combined management process to enable the delivery of a guaranteed end-to-end QoS. The integrated management together with its requirements we will call the management view. In our QoS mapping process we identify four types of QoS specifications: (1) subjective end-user requirements; (2) the application´s QoS view including QoS profiles and application QoS parameters; (3) objective QoS parameters, and (4) network QoS parameters used for signalling QoS through the network.