In this paper we envisage the issue of Quality of Service (QoS) management for multimedia services as an end to end QoS discovery problem. With this perception as a basis, we designed and implemented a layered QoS management architecture which handles QoS from the user's perspective, as well as from the end system's and the network's perspective. The architecture is decomposed into three layers. First there is the QoS speci$cation, presentation and parameterization layec at which an end user is able to specih hidher QoS requirements in a comprehensible and qualitative way, and at which these QoS requirements are translated into parameterized terminal capabilities. Secondly, there is the QoS matching and negotiation layer at which the parameterized QoS capabilities of different terminal end systems are matched and compared in order to search for a QoS equilibrium. Finally, there is the QoS implementation layer; which implements the resolved QoS equilibrium in the network and in the terminals.This generic architecture, which allows a de-abstraction of user dejined QoS, has been implemented in the context of a CORBA based TINA platform.become more familiar with multimedia services, QoS will have to be approached from the user's perspective, as well as from the end system's and the network's perspective. End users wanting to come into a multimedia service should be able to specify their QoS requirements in a comprehensive and qualitative way. In turn, the terminal system will translate these specifications into parameterized terminal multimedia capabilities. Within the network the QoS capabilities of multiple end systems are matched and an optimal QoS equilibrium is implemented for the multimedia session.In this paper we will study a distributed QoS management and control architecture, which implements an end to end QoS discovery mechanism as explained above. This architecture has been designed and developed within a TINA framework with CORBA as a distributed processing environment (DPE). In this paper we will assume that the reader has a basic knowledge about the informational models managed by a TINA system and how such a system is decomposed into distributed computational components (for more information, see [ 11). The paper is further structured as follows: in the next section we will decompose the system in different layers and computational objects. The following two sections will each in turn discuss the important aspects of the different layers of the architecture. Section 5 includes a complete scenario and section 6 concludes the paper. A layered QoS Architecture projected on a TINA system 1 IntroductionThe widespread demand and use of interactive multimedia applications is setting forth new challenges on existing and emerging networking systems but also on the integrated control and management of quality of service (QoS). Provisioning and maintaining hard QoS guarantees during multimedia sessions is a complex process which encompasses tasks and procedures in both terminal and network domains. The majority...

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