Providing quality of service monitoring: challenges and approaches

Future integrated services networks will need to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees to multimedia applications. To ensure that the contracted QoS is sustained, it is not sufficient to just commit resources. QoS monitoring is required to detect and locate the degradation of QoS performance. In addition, the distribution of QoS, instead of simply end-to-end QoS, needs to be monitored. In QoS distribution monitoring, the distribution of QoS experienced by a real-time flow in different network segments is monitored. This paper presents a brief survey of current QoS monitoring-related mechanisms, followed by a discussion of the challenges involved in providing QoS distribution monitoring. Several approaches are then proposed to meet these challenges.