Soft quality-of-service control for multimedia traffic on ATM networks

The provision of bandwidth-on-demand with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees has long been a promise of ATM networks. However existing traffic management services provide only static traffic contracts bound to network-level QoS measured in terms of traffic engineering parameters. These parameters do not convey application-specific needs. As a result, the network does not consider the sensitivity of application performance to bandwidth allocation leading to inefficient use of bandwidth and poor end-to-end system performance. A novel traffic management framework for adaptive multimedia applications based on bandwidth renegotiation with soft QoS guarantees is presented. The design of a soft-QoS controller is given. Experimental results using interactive MPEG video applications show that the proposed framework allows the network to double the number of accepted connections while meeting their soft-QoS requirements for a wide range of bandwidth renegotiation requests