Service and Network Monitoring Support for Integrated End-to-End QoS Management

Successful mass market provision of audio-visual services that would produce revenues for the content/service providers and network operators necessitates the use of an integrated management based on the end-to-end QoS over heterogeneous networks and terminals. This paper first briefly introduces the IST ENTHRONE II project framework for QoS- enabled multimedia contents access, where a central concept is the integrated end-to-end management. Then, the focus of the paper is to present a novel service oriented monitoring system architecture as an essential part of this management. The proposed QoS monitoring system aims at providing monitoring information to service providers for providing quantified QoS- based services and their dynamic adaptation and to network operators for dynamic resource allocation allowing better usage of network resources. Performance evaluation conducted using a test-bed shows the responsiveness and the measurements accuracy of proposed end-to-end monitoring solution.