A Multi-Agent Architecture for Cooperative Quality of Service Management

The QoS management approaches developed so far are usually not suitable any more for applications which involve too large a number of communicating entities; for instance, negotiation of QoS parameters between the sender and every single receiver becomes impossible (in case of thousands of receivers). To solve this problem, we developed a QoS management approach, we called Cooperative QoS management, which allows a decentralized cooperative management of QoS; it does not limit the number of users of the application. In this paper we present a multi-agent architecture that implements the cooperative QoS management approach. Agents are installed on system components, such as routers and end-systems; when a user asks for a service with specific QoS requirements a kind of cooperation is initiated between agents to (“best”) serve the user.