Howard Bowman, J.W. Bryans and J. Derrick

Computing Lab., U. of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF, UK

Tel: +44-1227-827570 and Fax: +44-1227-762811

{H.Bowman, J.W.Bryans, J.Derrick}@ukc.ac.uk

It is now well recognised that the next generation of distributed systems will be distributed multimedia systems. Central to multimedia systems is quality of service, which defines the non-functional requirements on the system. In this paper we investigate how stochastic process algebra can be used in order to determine the quality of service properties of distributed multimedia systems. We use a simple multimedia stream as our basic example. We describe it in the Stochastic Process Algebra PEPA and then we analyse whether the stream satisfies a set of quality of service parameters: throughput, end-to-end latency, jitter and error rates.