Over the past several years there has been a considerable amount of research within the field of quality-ofservice (QoS) support for distributed multimedia systems. To date, most of the work has been within the context of individual architectural layers such as the distributed system platform, operating system, transport subsystem and network layers. Much less progress has been made in addressing the issue of overall end-to-end support for multimedia communications. In recognition of this, a number of research teams have proposed the development of QoS architectures which incorporate QoS-configurable interfaces and QoS driven control and management mechanisms across all architectural layers. This paper examines the state-of-theart in the development of QoS architectures. The approach taken is to present QoS terminology and a generalized QoS framework for understanding and discussing QoS in the context of distributed multimedia systems. Following this, we evaluate a number of QoS architectures that have emerged in the literature.

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Telecommunication Management Networks can be considered as a set of distributed objects interacting to perform the network monitoring and control functions.In this paper, we explore the way to a full object distribution based on the OMG CORBA principles. Some studies and the early results of the X/Open-NM Forum XoJIDM working group indicate that this is possible and promising for the future.We analysed, designed and implemented a full TMN Operation System based on CORBA object distribution. One of our main priority has been to preserve the interoperability with existing TMN components based on CMIP, taking advantage of the existing assets of information models defined with GDMO, that we kept as the specification language for interfaces between components. Specialized CORBA services offering TMN specific services have been defined using CORBA Common Object Services whenever that was possible.