Investigations Into Quality of Service (QoS) Issues With Transmission Of Multimedia Information Over a Connectionless Network

The Internet is one big connectionless network which has over the years offered best-effort delivery services to IP packets with no delivery guarantee and indiscriminate drop of packets in the event of network congestion. The best-effort service model is adequate for conventional data applications such as FTP, Telnet and email, but not suitable for time sensitive applications (real-time). Transmission of high quality multimedia applications on the Internet is faced with many challenges such as the indiscriminate packet loss, delay and delay variation Gitter), bandwidth and processing capabilities of end-user terminals. To fulfill the requirement of such applications end-to-end QoS guarantees must be provided. Packet loss and delay are the main determining factors of multimedia service quality. This makes modeling and monitoring of these parameters very important QoS provisioning for multimedia information. Measurement techniques are very essential to QoS provisioning because it is only through measurements that we can understand networks behaviors. To provide QoS for multimedia applications the Internet Society has developed several standards and protocols such as IntServ, DiffServ, MPLS, H.323 and SIP. The main objective of QoS is to enable an architectural model where delay, packet loss and jitter can be managed through well meaning policies such SLAs.School of Computing, Communications and ElectronicsSchool of Computing, Communications and Electronic