2 TECHNOLOGIES FOR END USER QOS 

2.1 Introduction 

In this chapter, a number of key issues and enabling technologies that are relevant to this 

dissertation are examined. Firstly, the area of QoS and current approached to Service 

Management are discussed. Following on from this, Service Level Agreements are discussed 

including a briefing on the components of a SLA. Concluding the chapter is a review of the 

technologies for monitoring QoS and describing SLAs. 

2.2 Quality of Service 

In the following section, Quality of Service (QoS) is discussed as it is a mechanism that 

allows some predictability to be introduced to services delivered via the Web at a number of 

different architectural levels such as IP and application level QoS.  

2.2.1 What is Quality of Service 

As stated in the introduction, Quality of Service has a number of different meanings 

depending on the context we are talking about. Essentially Quality of Service means 

providing consistent, predictable data delivery service. In other words, satisfying customer 

application requirements. Once can refer to QoS at a number of different levels including 

network, application and end user QoS.  For example, implementing QoS so that specific 

users can receive a better that  best effort  service from a Webserver has been investigated 

[4]. 

2.2.2 Why the need for QoS 

One may ask the question as to why QoS is needed at all. For example, in networks there is 

an increasing investment in new technologies that are increasing bandwidth available for use 

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