Design and evaluation of a management middleware to multimedia communication services

Regarding the current context of network technologies we can note that the available infrastructure could appropriately support Quality of Service (QoS) requirements (for example, bandwidth, delay, etc.), however, it look likes that development of applications was not sufficiently stimulated to use all the provided attributes. Thus, a middleware could provide transparency and flexibility to the application communication requirements, as well as to present feasible multimedia services. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to describe the design, architecture and implementation of a specific middleware that manages multimedia communication services on current 3th generation network environments. Besides, middleware operation, applicability and practical conclusions were obtained through a prototype, which demonstrated in heterogeneous environments feasibility, acceptable performance and quality related to the Supported services.