An Analysis of Quality of Service Architectures

During the last years Internet evolution demanded for new and richer applications. To fulfill the novel and more complex application requirements, new solutions in many domains were required. One of these domains is the network support, assuring, into some extend, a specific or predictable treatment to traffic; therefore, in this chapter, we present a broad view of the main efforts available on the literature in order to provide Quality of Service (QoS) in both wired networks and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). For this purpose, the authors present: (1) the more relevant QoS architectures and technologies along with some of its recent improvements; (2) the different perspectives that combine some of those architectures and technologies into more complex solutions, in order to achieve stronger QoS and/or performance; (3) the most relevant QoS issues in WSNs environments; and (4) through the comparison of the several solutions, they list the advantages and limitations and reveal some relations among the existing QoS solutions.