QoS management in programmable networks through mobile agents

In delivering multimedia services, quality of service represents a crucial commitment to be satisfied. Very often it has been considered only from a theoretical point of view, leaving any implementation details out of the discussion, mainly for the lack of concrete possibilities to execute its control and management effectively. Recent technological developments in the networking and distributed programming fields are now opening new challenging scenarios towards the negotiation and guarantee of QoS in the delivery of multimedia services through the network. Active or programmable networks are becoming a reality, and the migration of software components among network nodes seems to be the direction pursued by most of network manufactures. Mobile software agents represent a very attractive approach to the distributed control of computer networks and a valid alternative to the implementation of strategies for the management of QoS. In this paper, we present our approach to QoS management through mobile agents. The potentiality of this approach is shown through two application examples. The first one focuses on resource reservation through RSVP in an int-serv scenario, while the second one shows how to provide QoS to aggregated traffic flowing through a virtual network.