Bringing service differentiation to the end system

A number of distributed applications require communication services with quality of service (QoS) guarantees. For this purpose, resource management is required both in the end system and inside the network. To date several approaches have been proposed, dealing either with end system issues or with those more strictly related to the network, but no unified view exists. Furthermore, while network QoS provisioning has reached a good level of standardization, no standard proposals exist for the end systems. We argue that a single architectural model is needed, taking into account a more exhaustive concept of "resource management", where quality of service is defined at the level of user perception. We propose an architectural model that enhances the IETF Diffserv framework in order to provide service differentiation even inside network end-points. We also present a prototype implementation of such architecture along with experimental results validating the proposed solution.