Architectural support for QoS management and abstraction: SALMON: (Support Architecture for transmission of Live Media streams On networks)

High-performance communication protocols are being used in our lab as an experimental base for advanced distributed applications with a special focus on quality of service (QoS) characteristics. During our recent work, we recognized that QoS abstractions would prove very useful for facilitating distributed application development. As a first base, we present a management tool for inspecting and controlling QoS related characteristics on top of XTPX (eXpress Transfer Protocol Extended) and TCP/IP. Based on a classification of QoS requirements of various multimedia data streams, the design and implementation of a higher-level QoS manager tool and channel library named SALMON is then described. We finally illustrate how such an approach will be integrated with traditional client/server platforms such as the OSF Distributed Computing Environment.