Quality of Service control in multimedia network clusters

We introduce a control architecture in which several (independent) multimedia clusters share the same (local or metropolitan) networking resources in a controlled framework. In particular, a central entity (i.e., the Gatekeeper) harmonizes the transmission rates of the various clusters following a given sharing policy. Each cluster, in turn, adopts its own end-to-end rate control mechanism to meet the Gatekeeper's transmission rate indications. A testbed has been developed and the system has been evaluated with real experiments by using different types of transmission sources. A software architecture is also introduced and described, with particular reference to the middleware framework realized with the Jini system.