MANAGEMENT OF QUALITY OF SERVICE WITH SOFTWARE AGENTS

As distributed multimedia applications become more widely diffused, sy stems for quality of service (QoS) management are increasingly essenti al. In this paper we present an architecture for distributed QoS manag ement based on software agents. We discuss the advantages of using age nt technology in a problem inherently distributed and complex such as QoS management. Besides introducing several negotiation and coordinati on techniques among agents as fundamental properties for QoS managemen t, it is argued in favor of decision making based on analytical and si mulative modeling techniques. Furthermore, design and implementation i ssues are discussed in detail and our Java-based platform for agent-ba sed QoS management is introduced.