ATM is representative of the connection-oriented resource provisioning class of protocols. An ATM network isexpected to provide end-to-end QoS guarantees to connections in the form of bounds on delays, errors and/or losses.Performance management involves measurement of QoS parameters, and application of control measures (if required)to improve the QoS provided to connections, or to improve the resource utilization at switches. QoS provisioning is veryimportant for real-time connections in which losses are irrecoverable and delays cause interruptions in service. Mostscheduling disciplines provide static allocation of resources at connection setup time. End-to-end bounds are obtainablefor some schedulers, however these are precluded for heterogeneously composed networks. The resource allocation doesnot adapt to the QoS provided to connections in real-time. In addition, mechanisms to measure the QoS of a connectionin real-time are scarce.

A novel framework for QoS management is proposed in this paper to provide QoS guarantees to real-time connections.It comprises of in-service QoS monitoring mechanisms, a hierarchical scheduling algorithm based on dynamicpriorities that are adaptive to measurements, and methods to tune the schedulers at individual nodes based on the endto-end measurements.