Multimedia computing and communications are imposing new transfer and delivery requirements on network system components. Hence, the control-management level of the host and underlying network architectures has become a key issue in any distributed multimedia system. This article discusses resource management at the host and network level to achieve global guaranteed transmission and presentation services--that is, end-to-end guarantees. The emphasis is on host resources (such as CPU processing time) and network resources (such as bandwidth and buffer space) that need to be controlled to satisfy quality-of-service (QoS) requirements set by users of networked multimedia systems. Controlling the specified resources involves three actions: (1) allocating resources (end-to-end) during multimedia call establishment so that traffic can flow according to the QoS specification, (2) controlling resource allocation during multimedia data transmission, and (3) adapting to changes caused by degradation of a system component's capacity. These actions imply the need for (1) new services, such as admission control at the hosts and intermediate network nodes; (2) new protocols for establishing connections that satisfy QoS requirements along the path from sender to receiver(s), such as a resource reservation protocol; (3) new mechanisms for delay, rate, and error control; (4) new resource monitoring protocols for reporting system changes; (5) new adaptive schemes for dynamic resource allocation to respond to system changes; and (6) new architectures in the hosts and switches to accommodate the resource management entities. The article gives an overview of services, mechanisms, and protocols for resource management.
