Adaptable QoS Management Communication Architectures for User Perception

Abstract

Distributed multimedia systems are characterised by a broad spectrum of quality of service (QoS) parameters which must be managed dynamically to ensure an acceptable user experience. Whilst there has been a considerable amount of work on QoS management itself, not the same can be said about the way that variations in QoS impact upon the user multimedia experience. We introduce the term quality of perception (QoP) to characterise the latter and, in this chapter, after a review of QoS-oriented communication architectures and protocols, highlight our experiences of using a specifically tailored adaptive communication protocol to provide an enhanced QoP.