Communication application programming interfaces with quality of service support

The provision of a communication infrastructure which is able to support applications for life long learning is a major challenge. Distance learning and teletraining applications will be heavily based on multimedia information. The communication infrastructure has to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS) support via application programming interfaces (APIs) to the applications. Therefore we looked into several QoS aware APIs and made a comparison between them. Winsock 2 on the client side and XTI on the UNIX server side are QoS aware, support both RSVP and native ATM and will be widely deployed. Therefore we decided to look first into these QoS APIs. As an application, we developed a MPEG-2 video streaming prototype which makes use of ATM's SVC and bandwidth reservation capabilities. After these first successful trials we will provide a large QoS aware backbone communication infrastructure based on ATM switches, with ATM to the desktop in specific application areas. In further steps we are going to deploy RSVP in non ATM based networks like FDDI, Ethernet and token-ring to deliver video streaming for specific user groups. In this paper we summarize the most important specifications and implementations of QoS aware communication APIs. Finally, we are suggesting a solution for a platform independent QoS aware API that is based on Java.