Paving the first mile for QoS-dependent applications and appliances

Paving the first mile of quality-of-service (QoS) support has become essential for full deployment and utilization of QoS proposals in the Internet. Most of existing efforts have been made to provide network services and control without paying much attention to how applications can use these services. In this paper, we design and implement a two-tier architecture, called QoS Gateway (QoSGW), that acts as an interface between application QoS requirements and network-provided QoS capabilities. The QoSGW is to support small embedded network devices that rely on network-provided QoS. Our architecture, in its full version, is composed of two key components: (i) an agent that resides on the end-host and provides an adequate interface for QoS-dependent applications, and (ii) a QoS manager that provides an interface to network services for the agents. Using these two components enhances generality and scalability in providing QoS support for Internet applications and end-devices. The QoSGW is intended to promote QoS deployment and facilitate construction of QoS-aware access networks.