Quality of service in information technology

Abstract

The Information Technologies and Telecommunications industries in last decade went through dynamic development motivated by mobility, wireless technologies and miniaturization. The future of Information Technologies will be driven by ubiquitous computerization, Telecommunications infrastructures and Management Information Systems. While, the future of Telecommunications industry will be driven by five major drives for prosperity starting with the Differentiated Networks, Health Informatics, Advanced Television, Sensors Networks and Ubiquitous Computing. The world today is driven by the information exchange providing support for the national and global cooperation. The supporting telecommunications infrastructures are becoming more complex providing the platform for the user driven real-time applications over the large geographical distances. The essential decisions made concerning the national economy, health, education, business, national security and defense, depend on the Quality of Service provision in current and future Telecommunications and Data Networks infrastructures. The continuous increase in the complexity and the heterogeneity of Telecommunications infrastructures will require new assessment methods of QoS provision that are capable of addressing all engineering and social issues with much faster speeds. Speed and accessibility to any information at any time from anywhere will create global communications infrastructures with great performance bottlenecks that may put in danger human lives, power supplies, national transport, economy and security. Regardless of the technology supporting the information flows, the final verdict on the QoS is made by the end user. The users' perception of telecommunications' network infrastructure QoS provision is critical to the successful business management operation of any organization. This habilitation work with author's selected research publications presented in the habilitation thesis contribute to the field of Information Technology and Computing industry, while presenting the importance of the QoS provision and methodologies to assess the QoS provision in light of user's perception. The habilitation work discusses the important issues related to middleware technologies such as CORBA, TINA, Multimedia Technologies, as well as issues related to QoS provision in the current and future Internet and Telecommunications Industries. In addition, author's selected articles present a cost effective methodology to assess the user's perception of QoS provision utilizing the existing Staffordshire University Network by adding a component of measurement to the existing model presented by Walker. The methodology offers a cost effective approach to assess the QoS provision within the University campus network, which could be easily adapted to any transport, logistics or management organization in the world. The habilitation work presents author's important contributions and future vision in the field of QoS provision and application to Information Technology.