ROUTING OF MULTIMEDIA STREAMS A QUALITY - OF - SERVICE APPROACH

Abstract

For correct processing and transport of continuous media streams such as audio and video, it is essential to meet the timing requirements of the media. To guarantee a certain Quality of Service (QoS) in multimedia systems, careful resource management based on these requirements is needed. The selection of a network route for a particular media stream should hence take into account which route is best suited for providing this QoS. Several new architectures [6] have been developed for supporting multimedia applications. However, QoS routing is an important element that is still missing from these architectures. In this dissertation routing of multimedia streams based on QoS is investigated. QOS Finder is a method for QoS based routing of multimedia streams. It is based on a path vector protocol that takes into account throughput, delay, and loss rate of individual route segments. A simulation of QOS Finder shows that its heuristic is superior to metrics that are only based on one of these parameters .QoS Finder increases the probability of finding suitable paths through networks for distributed multimedia applications.