An adaptive end-to-end QoS management with dynamic protocol configurations

The widespread deployment of distributed multimedia services and applications has led to increasing demands in QoS services. In order to deliver QoS to these applications regardless of the presence of QoS mechanisms in the network, runtime QoS adaptation at the end nodes is essential. In this paper, we present a middleware for adaptive multimedia communication. QMan, an end-to-end QoS management framework, is designed to capitalize on dynamic protocol configurability provided by OCTOPUS dynamic protocol framework (ODPF). The provision of on-the-fly reflection of protocol configurations in ODPF allows QMan to offer a flexible approach in dealing with QoS violations. By using this technique, QMan is able to perform QoS adaptation at a higher level. QMan also provides other QoS management functions: specification, negotiation, mapping, and monitoring. Both QMan and ODPF are independent components of the OCTOPUS middleware.