ABSTRACT
Distributed multimedia applications with real time capabilities 
will come up to the desktop, as soon as Quality of Service (QoS) 
capable networks are easy to program for. Therefore, we propose 
a QoS application programmer interface (API) for the Java language, 
which provides an abstraction from QoS capable networks and allows 
a simple specification of QoS parameters. Platform independence is 
achieved by Java, which also allows easy integration with the World 
Wide Web if the classes are used within applets. We first describe 
our architecture, which abstracts from different QoS capable transport 
protocols and networks and provides easy to use access to QoS networking. 
We identify different layers within a distributed multimedia application 
and show, how mapping of QoS parameters at different layers can be 
accomplished by our API. Different performance evaluations show, that 
our architecture can reach up to 90% the performance of native code 
measured during a stream test and up to 87% measured during a 
request-response test.

KEYWORDS: Quality of Service, Java, Application Programmer Interface, 
Distributed Multimedia Applications