User Service Assistant: an end-to-end reactive QoS architecture

The rapid deployment of interactive and multimedia applications, and the increased mobility of computers leads to the need for new technical solutions in computing systems. The Internet comprises a heterogeneous set of networks with very different characteristics, especially considering the increased usage of wireless networks. Even the end systems are architecturally very different, and these factors combined lead to the unreliable and unpredictable performance of networked applications. One of the problems today is the question of how to manage resources and thus provide users with control over the behavior of applications, known as quality-of-service (QoS) management. Much work has been done within this area, but all proposed schemes have one thing in common, a high level of complexity, which so far has prevented any of them from being fully implemented. We propose a new approach towards QoS management, in our User Service Assistant (USA). A QoS management framework should work independently of applications and available resources, and that it should react to user input rather than trying to predict the users' perception of quality. We focus on the feasibility of implementing USA, and we realized it with an experimental application. This paper first lays out the framework, describes the differences between USA and other proposed schemes, and then describes the implementation of the framework. After that, we describe extensions to the implementation we propose to evaluate next, in order to fully assess the model. Finally, we discuss the framework and its implications.