QoS specification and adaptive bandwidth monitoring for multimedia delivery

Traditionally, multimedia delivery on the Internet has concentrated on providing a single service quality, "best effort", where all types of media are given the same level of importance in a network. Only recently has there been an emphasis on monitoring bandwidth in a network, and adjusting service quality depending on the current bandwidth. One important aspect on which little research has been done is: "how can users specify the requirements and priorities by which multimedia quality should be adjusted given bandwidth limitations"? We design a quality of service (QoS) specification strategy and delivery criteria using adaptive bandwidth monitoring that best fits the specifications to the available resources. In order to provide QoS-based delivery a prioritization method has been designed to order information according to the preferences of a user. Java applets and CGI programming tools are used to provide an interactive Web retrieval environment. At present, JPEG quality, resolution and delay are used as parameters to determine the QoS. We are extending the work to include video delivery and distributed implementation with QoS in the future.