QMan: an adaptive end-to-end QoS management architecture

Recognizing the need to provide end-to-end QoS for performance sensitive applications, and the need to manage such QoS provisions in the presence of diverse application QoS requirements as well as heterogeneous network environment, we propose an adaptive end-to-end QoS management architecture QMan, to address such issues. QMan, as one of the key components of OCTOPUS middleware, makes no presumption of the underneath QoS provisions for end-to-end QoS management, but can take advantage of such provisions if there are. QMan allows applications to exchange QoS requirements and negotiate for a suitable protocol stack configuration with the assistance from dynamic protocol framework (DPF). During data transmission, QMan monitors QoS violations and performs QoS adaptations according to the rules defined through a combination of three possible conduits in an end-to-end fashion: network level, host level and application level. These rules are pre-determined according to application requirements or network policies and can be re-configured for customization of QoS adaptations during run-time. Performance evaluations of our implementation demonstrate the feasibility of QMan's design with satisfactory performance.