A study for provisioning of QoS web-based services to the end-user

Although QoS provision has been researched extensively for B-ISDN (ATM based) networks and it is also under research for IP networks (Internet), until recently there was no real service environment to provide such QoS to end users. Demonstrators and laboratory experiments aimed mainly at proving specific technologies and architectures. Recent advances in the commercialisation of technology and respective standardisation effort have changed the scenery. End to end networks, capable of QoS support, are in a maturity status that will enable commercial deployment within the next few years. Still, there are no applications to take advantage of such services. It would be most desirable to enhance the way users use current applications (such as the established WEB browser), than to try to introduce new application S/W. This paper proposes a method based on the Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) specification [1] that enables the Quality of Service (QoS) for bandwidth demanding applications such as multimedia applications, by introducing S/W modules as enhancements into the existing applications. This method targets to the end-user, when using the network topolgy that is being standarised by the Full Services Access Network (FSAN) [2].