In the context of electronic commerce, standardization of the equipment and software packages is not possible. Furthermore, the Internet is evolving as a collection of heterogeneous networks with different capabilities. Therefore the infrastructure has to be able to deal with subsystems of different capabilities. This is particularly true for the quality of service (QoS) of communication between the different end-systems involved in the application. It is expected that the Internet will provide in the future, in addition to its traditional "best effort'' service also some form of guaranteed service quality, probably at a cost, which is based on the reservation of appropriate system resources. However, in certain situations, particularly for users accessing the system through wireless communications, the available QoS may be severely limited (at least of applications including video transmission). Even though QoS negotiation and adaptation issues have been studied before, the global system management aspects related to the provisioning of negotiated QoS have not yet been studied.
Organization of workshops: Workshop on QoS and Performance at the International
Symposium on Electronic Commerce (2001) in Hong Kong, April 2001