Client-network Interactions In Quality of Service Communication Environments

Multimedia communication, with its strong requirements for high speed, assured quality, and reliable networking, is stimulating a great research effort towards the development of real-time protocols. Some protocols of this type have been proposed, which offer communication services with different levels of commitment in providing quality of service guarantees. In this paper we study the feasibility of an extended client interface that allows more flexibility in the client-network interactions. The proposed model improves the utilisation of network resources, and increases the network's capability to support multimedia traffic, while continuing to offer a guaranteed quality of service.