Managing QoS for multimedia applications in a differentiated services environment

The overall quality of network connections has a significant impact on the performance of networked applications. Consequently, QoS management for networked multimedia applications over IP is a significant and immediate challenge. While differentiated services (diffserv) provide a sense of resource allocation and QoS, they do not guarantee QoS. This paper presents design, implementation and evaluation of a content-aware bandwidth broker (CABB) that manages QoS of multimedia applications for the diffserv environment. CABB allocates network resources to multimedia flows based on client requirement and the tolerance and adaptability of the application. CABB has been implemented and evaluated using the NS-2 simulator toolkit. Evaluations show that CABB improves network resource allocations and increases overall throughput. The results also show that multimedia flows are better managed and controlled, thereby improving perceived QoS and avoiding possible congestion in core routers.