Design and implementation of an agent-based architecture for QoS management

With the rapid growth of network multimedia applications such as video conferencing, multimedia communications, more and more network data transmissions require Quality of Service (QoS) management mechanisms. In order to guarantee QoS to individual user sessions, elaborate QoS management functions such as QoS routing, resource reservation, QoS adaptation are required. In this thesis, we propose an architecture of route servers to handle these functions integrally on behalf of individual routers in a network domain. In the architecture, the establishment and maintenance of a QoS session follow related and de-coupled phases. The functionality of the route server is implemented using the combination of agent and active network technologies. That is, the co-operative stationary and mobile agents are deployed to perform the QoS management tasks, such as QoS negotiation, routing, resource reservation, adaptation, and network data collecting, etc. We will discuss the QoS requirements of distributed multimedia applications, and various management issues involved in the establishment and maintenance of a QoS session. Also, we will investigate the mobile agent and active network technologies, and their potential roles in QoS management. Based on these researches, we will describe our agent-based QoS management architecture which is developed on a cooperative mobile agent platform. The architecture is designed to provide QoS management and negotiation services for multimedia applications that needs QoS support.