Design and implementation of a network domain agency for scaleable QoS in the Internet

Quality of Service (QoS) in the Internet is one of the most active research areas in recent years. With the introduction of sophisticated multimedia applications, researchers have concentrated on finding solutions to make the Internet a suitable environment. The obvious solution is to enable applications to reserve network resources according to their QoS needs. Researchers have also suggested enhancing the existing routing protocols to handle QoS. In this paper, we present an end-to-end QoS architecture based on resource reservations. The architecture proposes the introduction of domain agencies in network domains. The domain agency is responsible for managing the resources in its domain and for reserving resources according to the requests received from the end users. It handles immediate and advance resource reservations and adapts the reserved resources according to user interactions. It contains a QoS routing agent to construct a QoS path. This QoS routing agent uses a modification of Dijkstra's algorithm to find a shortest-narrowest path that accommodates the requested QoS. We describe the implementation of the architecture in an agent environment, which provides a good opportunity to test and analyze the system.