Quality of service support for networked media players

Existing media players, the applications that allow access to stored multimedia data, have been designed for standalone use. Consequently, they do not provide quality of service (QoS) support needed for access to remote data. In this paper, we describe QoS architecture provided in OS/2 multimedia extensions. This architecture defines layered QoS definitions consisting of user-specific, data-specific and network-specific categories. Applications use user-specific QoS parameters, which are translated into network-specific parameters by the system. Such a scheme provides portability allowing access to data stored on different types of file servers residing on a variety of networks without the application being aware of the network QoS mechanisms.