A QoS-providing multicast network management system

Managing a multimedia communication system requires a sophisticated model that accommodates many techniques developed in various fields of media transport, QoS provision and network management. In particular, it is important to establish a QoS-oriented network management model for multicast applications, but there have been little research efforts to integrate multimedia QoS from the aspect of multicast network management. This paper proposes and implements an integrated network management system to accommodate time-critical multimedia applications in multicast network environments. The proposed system encompasses the key concepts of classical network management systems and further extends the concepts to handle the QoS issue of multimedia applications. The concept of the proposed management system is described in detail followed by notes on implementation issues. The proposed system has been validated by applying the implemented system to a real-time H.263 video multicast system. The experimental results show that following the proposed multicast network management scheme the QoS parameters are successfully negotiated and as a result the quality of the multicast stream is appropriately adjusted.