An architecture for managing quality of service on broadband networks

For services offered by B-ISDNs many corporate telecommunication departments will write contracts with their users to provide classes of network services and to guarantee certain levels of performance in terms of, for instance, end-to-end response time and availability. In general a level of performance can be quantified in terms of the quality (QOS) of some service offered by the network. QOS management permits the customer to monitor and control directly the utilization, performance and related parameters. In the context of this paper network management is taken to mean the more restricted QOS management at the subscriber-level. >