A generic API for quality of service networking based on Java

Distributed multimedia applications with real time capabilities will come to the desktop, as soon as quality of service (QoS) capable networks are easy to program for. Therefore, we propose a QoS application programmer interface (API) for the Java language, which provides an abstraction from QoS capable networks and allows a simple specification of QoS parameters. Platform independence is achieved by Java, which also allows easy integration with the World Wide Web if the classes are used within applets. We first describe our architecture, which abstracts from different QoS capable transport protocols and networks and provides easy to use access to QoS networking. We identify different layers within a distributed multimedia application and show how mapping of QoS parameters at different layers can be accomplished by our API. Different performance evaluations show that our architecture can reach up to 90% the performance of native code measured during a stream test and up to 87% measured during a request response test.