Network level support for QOS commitment

Distributed multimedia applications such as those supported by emerging multimedia workstations will generate communications traffic with a wide range of service requirements. This paper addresses the problems of supporting QoS in the network region, focusing on the provision of services to continuous media traffic. The main objective is to determine what resources must be allocated throughout the network region, in order to ensure that the service guarantees required by continuous media traffic are met. An outline of the Quality of Service Architecture is given and the concept of QoS commitment explained. The effect that continuous media transport protocols will have on traffic sources is considered. An end-to-end model for the network region is introduced and applied to a local area ATM network