End-to-end provision of policy information for network QoS

High-end networked applications such as distance visualization, distributed data analysis, and advanced collaborative environments have demanding quality of service (QoS) requirements. We focus on making policy decisions when users attempt to make reservations for network bandwidth across several administrative network domains that are controlled by a bandwidth broker. We present a signalling protocol that facilitates the establishment of a distributed policy decision point as well as the establishment of a direct signalling channel between the source and end domains.