Quality-of-service support for multimedia applications

A major project at Lancaster University is the development of network infrastructures capable of supporting the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of a wide range of distributed multimedia applications. The project includes more than thirty researchers and covers not only the network support but also the enabling technologies. The authors believe that QoS development cannot be done in isolation from the applications to be supported, which must form an integral part of the project. They focus on three application areas: interactive teaching and learning, mobile systems, and virtual reality. They chose applications that stretch network support to its limit. To realize the full potential of these distributed multimedia applications, the underlying network must satisfy all these requirements concurrently. They give a brief overview of their activities to this end and discuss the need for QoS support.