Towards QoS specification for distributed virtual environments

Understanding the quality of service (QoS) requirements of multimedia-rich and highly interactive applications such as distributed virtual environments (DVEs) is an open research issue. As a contribution to the ongoing research, this paper proposes a set of high level QoS characteristics for DVEs, namely, interactivity, immersion, and plausibility. Each QoS characteristic is further related to quantitative and qualitative applications and communication level parameters. The proposed approach is illustrated by an example involving telerobotics.