Agents based approach for QoS adaptation in distributed multimedia applications over ATM networks

Multimedia communications have evolved rapidly during the last few years and they now require communication services with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). For the type of these new distributed multimedia applications, it is crucial to monitor continuously the current QoS parameters of a connection to ensure that they comply with the pre-arranged negotiated values. The method proposed in this paper suggests the use of QoS monitoring agents in the ATM switches as well as in the end systems, in a way that allows automatic recovery, if possible, from all the QoS violations. The recovery will be achieved by redistributing the levels of QoS that should be supported immediately by a component to meet the end-to-end requirements. An initial architecture is proposed as well as the communication protocol between the agents and future directions are given.