Quality of service support for networked multimedia workstations
Peter Reynolds, H. W. Peter Beadle · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1996
The Communications Resource Manager (CRM) provides communications at a specified Quality of Service (QoS) for networked multimedia workstations in an environment where the network and workstation resources are changing. The CRM enables a consistent application interface and manages all workstation communications resources. It established network connections on behalf of applications, monitors their progress and notifies applications when network QoS events take place. Applications can then modify their behavior (compression rate, number of simultaneous media, media type) to cope with the change. The CRM provides mechanisms to negotiate at call setup time the level of multimedia support provided. If optimal resources are not available, call quality degradation paths allow call establishment at the highest QoS possible. Call admission based on on-going network performance monitoring and application performance feedback from the CRM can be used to prevent further QoS degradation by refusing to attempt connections when insufficient resources are available. The CRM enables existing multimedia workstations to communicate in an environment with known QoS. The CRM flows naturally into emerging QoS techniques for end-to-end ATM services. Because the CRM operates at the application level it is also applicable to the ATM interconnection of LANs whereas current ATM Forum proposals are not.