A framework for a distributed protocol set to provide better quality of service for multimedia delivery on IP networks

Internet is migrating from a simple data network to an environment where a more demanding multimedia content like audio, video, and IP telephony is being delivered. The Internet Protocol (IP) was originally designed to interconnect heterogeneous networks. It scales well by keeping the core network as simple and dumb as possible and provides a best effort delivery service. However, multimedia applications require something better than a simple best effort delivery. Many solutions have been proposed to implement quality of service (QoS) on IP networks. Typically, these methods do not take into account the inherent characteristics of multimedia data, and leave most of the work to the end hosts. In this paper, we propose a framework for a new protocol set to integrate network and application level QoS to reach the best possible quality for multimedia delivery over the Internet. The suggested method has a modular, distributed and scalable architecture, enabling it to easily grow as the network size and/or QoS requirements change.