Abstract
Most work related to quality of service (QoS) is concerned with individual system components, such as the operating system or the network. However, to support distributed multimedia applications, the entire distributed system must participate in providing the guaranteed performance levels. In recognition of this, a number of QoS architectures have been proposed to provide QoS guarantees. The mechanisms and schemes proposed by those architectures are used in a rather static manner since the involved entities, e.g., the network, sender and receiver, are known before the connection (call) set-up phase. In contrast to these architectures, we propose a general QoS management framework which supports the dynamic choice of a configuration of system components to support the QoS requirements for the user of a specific application. We consider different possible system configurations and select the most appropriate one depending on the desired QoS and the available resources. In this paper we present an overview of this general framework; especially, we concentrate on QoS negotiation and adaptation mechanisms. To show the feasibility of this approach, we designed and implemented a QoS manager for distributed multimedia presentational applications, such as news-on-demand. The negotiation and adaptation mechanisms which are supported by the QoS manager are specializations of the general framework. The proposed framework allows to improve the utilization of system resources, and thus to increase the system availability; it also allows to recover automatically, if this is possible, from QoS degradations. Furthermore, it provides the flexibility to incorporate different resource reservation schemes and scheduling policies, and to accommodate new system component technologies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
D.P. Anderson et al., “Support for continuous media in the DASH systems,” in Proc. of the 10th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, CS Press, Los Alamitos, California, 1990, pp. 54–61.
D. Anderson, R. Herrtwich, and C. Schaefer, “SRP: A resource reservation protocol for guaranteedperformance communications in the internet,” The International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, 1991.
G. v. Bochmann, B. Kerherve, A. Hafid, P. Dini, and A. Pons, “Functional design of adaptive systems,” in Proc. of the IEEE Workshop on Multimedia Software Development, Berlin, Germany, 1996.
A. Campbell, G. Coulson, and D. Hutchison, “A quality of service architecture,” ACM Computer Communication Review, April 1994.
G. Coulson, G. Blair, B. Stefani, F. Horn, and L. Hazard, “Supporting the real-time requirements of continuous media in open distributed processing,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Special Issue on Open Distributed Processing, 1993.
P. Dini, A. Hafid, and G. v. Bochmann, “Cost models for distributed multimedia applications,” in Proc. of the International Pacific Workshop on Distributed Multimedia Systems, Hong Kong, 1996.
R. Engler, M. Kaashoek, and J. O'Toole, “Exokernel: An operating system architecture for application-level resource management,” in Proc. of the Fifteenth Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Dec. 1995.
D. Ferrari, A. Banerjea, and H. Zhang, “Network support for multimedia,” Technical report 92-072, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, Nov. 1992.
D. Ferrari, “The tenet experience and the design of protocols for integrated services internetworks,” Multimedia Systems Journal, Nov. 1995.
G. Gopalakrishna and G. Parulkar, “Efficient quality of service in multimedia computer operating systems,” Department of Computer Science, Washington University, Report WUCS-TM-94-04, 1994.
A. Hafid and G. v. Bochmann, “A QoS negotiation procedure for distributedMMpresentational applications,” in Proc. of the Fifth IEEE International High Speed Distributed Computing (HPDC-5), Syracuse, New York, 1996.
A. Hafid and G. v. Bochmann, “Quality of service negotiation in news-on-demand systems: An implementation,” in Proc. of the Third International Workshop on Protocols for Multimedia Systems, Madrid, Spain, 1996.
A. Hafid and G. v. Bochmann, “Quality of service adaptation in distributed multimedia applications,” ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal, 1996, to appear.
A. Hafid, G. v. Bochmann, and R. Dssouli, “A negotiation approach with future reservation (NAFUR): A detailed study,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems Journal, 1996, to appear.
A. Hafid and S. Fischer, “A multi-agent architecture for cooperative quality of service management,” in Proc. of IFIP/IEEE Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks and Services (MMNS'97), Montreal, Canada, 1997.
J. Hanko, E. Kuerner, D. Northcut, and G. Wall, “Workstation support for time-critical applications,” Second International Workshop, Heidelberg, Germany, Nov. 1991.
S. Keshav and H. Saran, “Semantics and implementation of a native-mode ATM protocol stack,” Internal Technical Memo, AT&T Bell Lab, Murray Hill, NJ, Jan. 1995.
S. Khanna, M. Sebree, and J. Zolonowsky, “Real-time scheduling in SUN OS 5.0,” in Proc. of the USENIX Winter Conference, San Francisco, Jan. 1992.
I. Leslie, D. McAuely, and S.J. Mullender, “Pegasus—operating systems support for distributed multimedia systems,” Operating Systems Review, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1993.
K. Nahrstedt and J. Smith, “Application-driven approach to networked multimedia systems,” The 18th Conference on Local Computer Networks, 1993.
K. Nahrstedt, “An architecture for end-to-end quality of service provision and its experimental validation,” Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1995.
J. Rumbaugh, M. Blaha, W. Premerlani, F. Eddy, and W. Lorenson, “Object oriented modeling and design,” Prentice Hall, 1991.
S. Fisher, A. Hafid, G. v. Bochmann, and H. de Meer, “An approach to cooperative QoS management for multimedia applications,” in Proc. of the IEEE Multimedia Systems Conference, Ottawa, 1997.
H. Tokuda, T. Nakajima, and P. Rao, “Real-time mach: Towards a predictable real-time systems,” in Proc. of the USENIX Association Mach Workshop, Oct. 1990.
C. Topolcic (Ed.), “Experimental internet stream protocol: Version 2 (ST-II),” Internet RFC 1190, 90.
A. Vogel, B. Kerherve, G. v. Bochmann, and J. Gecsei, “Distributed multimedia applications and quality of service: A survey,” IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1995.
C. Volg, L. Wolf, R. Herrtwich, and H. Wittig, “HeiRat-quality of service management for distributed multimedia systems,” Multimedia Systems Journal, Nov. 1995.
J. Wong, K. Lyons, R. Velthuys, G. Bochmann, E. Dubois, N. Georganas, G. Neufeld, T. Ozsu, J. Brinskelle, D. Evans, A. Hafid, N. Hutchinson, P. Inglinski, B. Kerherve, L. Lamont, D. Makaroff, and D. Szafron, “Enabling technology for distributed multimedia applications,” IBM Systems Journal, 1997, to appear.
R. Braden, L. Zhang, S. Berson, S. Herzog, and S. Jamin, Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP)—Version 1 Functional Specification, RFC 2205, Sept. 1997.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hafid, A., Bochmann, G.v. An Approach to Quality of Service Management in Distributed Multimedia Application: Design and an Implementation. Multimedia Tools and Applications 9, 167–191 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009680223972
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009680223972