Would self-organized or self-managed networks lead to improved QoS?

Quality of Service (QoS) is an often misunderstood term. The International Standardisation (ISO) efforts of the early 1990s on a QoS Framework showed that there are several QoS aspects, the most significant being performance, availability and security. Ultimately, the most important consideration is that the service provided (by whatever system is providing it) is for the benefit of the user. Most of the research effort in the subsequent decade has been on the performance aspect (including, rightly, perceptual QoS), but unfortunately the other aspects have largely been ignored or overlooked. Both availability and security have a central role to play in ensuring the overall QoS of a networked system. Should either of these be compromised, there will be a fairly direct and negative impact on the system performance: this is a particularly topical issue