Abstract
The aim of this paper is to show the effect of the presence of specific management functions within a network that offers quality of service (QoS). The objective is not privileging a particular technology but to highlight the importance to know which control functions a solution may use, which performance limits the functions have and what can be a realistic user expectation.
The paper focuses on the meaning of QoS and on the applications requiring quality, then describes QoS solutions including transport technologies, QoSβoriented technologies, parameters and management functions. In more detail, the effect on QoS provision of the following issues is investigated and discussed concerning the possibility (or not) to aggregate and differentiate traffic, the implementation of call admission control and of traffic filtering to limit flows to their committed rates. Again, the conclusions should not be considered a merit mark about technology, but only an investigation about: what users and customers should expect by the technologies using specific control functions evidencing that the real limitations are not imposed by a specific technology, whose features may be changed and extended, but by the application of control functions that can guarantee requirements' matching. Copyright Β© 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.