Towards end-to-end QoS in service oriented architectures

Time sensitive networked applications require quality of service (QoS) support in the access networks in order to allocate resources that guarantee the timely delivery of data packets. The European IST integrated project EuQoS provides means to interoperate QoS solutions across selected access networks made available to application developers through a well defined interface. Software oriented architectures (SOA) here offer a promising approach to conceal the establishment of QoS sessions in the heterogeneous access network infrastructure behind a dedicated set of standardized interfaces. While UPnP as a deployment of a SOA defines a QoS architecture that aims to provide QoS support to locally networked devices, it does not allow for inter-domain QoS which is essential for networked applications that increasingly strive for deployment across converging networks (e.g. video-on-demand). This paper presents a new integrated approach that complements the UPnP QoS architecture with the EuQoS system. It encapsulates layer-3 QoS routing functionality and enables QoS sessions located in different subnets. Unlike UPnP it relies on parameterized rather than prioritized traffic descriptions, and thus allows for more accurate and efficient traffic handling. To our knowledge this is one of very few approaches that addresses end-to-end QoS issues in SOAs.