Quality of Service for Multimedia and Real-Time Services

New web technologies have encouraged the deployment of various network applications that are rich with multimedia and real-time services. These services demand stringent requirements are defined through Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as delay, jitter, loss, etc. To guarantee the delivery of these services QoS routing algorithms that deal with multiple metrics are needed. Unfortunately, QoS routing with multiple metrics is considered an NP-complete problem that cannot be solved by a simple algorithm. This paper proposes three source based QoS routing algorithms that find the optimal path from the service provider to the user that best satisfies the QoS requirements for a particular service. The three algorithms use the same filtering technique to prune all the paths that do not meet the requirements which solves the complexity of NP-complete problem. Next, each of the three algorithms integrates a different Multiple Criteria Decision Making method to select one of the paths that have resulted from the route filtering technique. The three decision making methods used are the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT), and Kepner-Tregoe KT. Results show that the algorithms find a path using multiple constraints with a high ability to handle multimedia and real-time applications.