IEEE MULTIMEDIA MAGAZINE 1 QoS Specification Languages for Distributed Multimedia Applications: A Survey and Taxonomy

Abstract—Quality of Service (QoS) is becoming an integral part of currently ubiquitous distributed multimedia applications. How-ever, before any QoS-related mechanisms and policies, such as ad-mission control, resource reservation, enforcement, and adapta-tion, can be invoked, applications need to express their QoS re-quirements. A considerable amount of research has been done in QoS-aware Application Programming Interface (API) design and QoS specification language development for multimedia systems. In this paper, we present an extensive survey of existing QoS spec-ification languages, and a taxonomy to classify and compare them. The paper provides readers with a global and insightful knowl-edge of this important area; knowing how to evaluate QoS lan-guages, and what aspects are most relevant when designing new languages. I