Re: Gnome Media Library

[Matthias Kranz <mskranz acm org>]

On Thu, Mar 23, 2000 at 01:29:49AM +0100, Nicholas Francis wrote:
> > > QoS ?
> >
> > Quality of Service.
> 
> Sorry for being dumb, but what exactly is this ?

Well, in the past, QoS has sometimes had more specific connotations
for particular technologies, such as ATM, but the term is now used
more broadly to refer to a network's ability to provide better service
to selected traffic for various technologies, including IP routed
networks.
IP packets could be sorted and classified into different traffic
classes (through different mechanisms) and these classes could be
handled appropriately based on various criterias including application
type, user and application ID, source or destination IP address, time
of day, ...
QoS parameters could be available bandwidth, link and end-to-end path
utilization, delay, latency, induced jitter ...
It is a very hot topic in the provider's world, since they want to
offer different types of quality - indeed for a different amount of
money. Interdomain QoS agreements and signaling are non-trivial
things to solve ;)

Cheers,
Matthias
-- 
Matthias Kranz                  mskranz@acm.org
         http://www.belug.org/~kranz
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again.
 Fail again. Fail better."     (Samuel Beckett)