To address Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in a domain of Local Area Networks(LANs) interconnected by at least one FDDI segment, network-wide bandwidth allocation is improved by a high availability Third Party Requestor (3PR) agent. The 3PR receives from the QoS Allocator all information that it needs to ask for bandwidth reservation on the FDDI segment. Following a Station Management standard, the 3PR is able to act on behalf of an FDDI station that will submit synchronous traffic and ask for bandwidth allocation to a Synchronous Bandwidth Allocator (SBA). According to the SBA decision, the 3PR will then answer to the network-centralized QoS Allocator which will grant or deny the allocation over the whole path within the LAN domain. If for some reason, the acting SBA function moves to another station, the 3PR at the new station will become active.

An apparatus and method for editing isochronous communication data used for communication between various electronic devices. An editing procedure with high accuracy can be conducted without reading the system data of isochronous communication in a system having co-existing isochronous and asynchronous modes of communication for data transmission between the electronic devices. The editing procedure can also be conducted with high accuracy in a system in which an edit controlling device cannot recognize the frame boundary in the information signals. Furthermore, even if there are various time delays associated with the instruction reception and the instruction execution by an electronic device, the editing procedure can be conducted with high accuracy.

Server-determined client refresh periods (CRPs) for dynamic directory services are disclosed. In a dynamic directory maintained by a server, clients must send a refresh message to the server every CRP in order to persist in the directory. The server desirably initially sets the CRP for the clients, and is able to later change the CRP. This allows the server to increase the CRP for at least some of the clients as more clients log onto the server, to ensure that the server is able to timely respond to all the clients.

Financial reciprocal compensation is provided for a predetermined Quality of Service (QoS) managed service path including various providers in an internetwork (such as the Internet). A user requests access to one or more of the services or resources advertised by a portal that employ the predetermined QoS (such as digital multimedia or Internet telephony). After the request is validated, the portal transmits a request to a primary QoS regulation server to determine the path segments required to deliver the service at the predetermined QoS level. If capable segments are available, the primary QoS regulation server will setup QoS regulation in its domain and request QoS regulation from the QoS regulation servers managing any other required segments in other domains (e.g., networks). After completing the setup, the primary QoS regulation server replies back to the portal with a success indication and an identification of an entry point to the QoS-regulated path. The portal then signals the service or resource to start. When the service has successfully started, the service usage is logged. When the service is terminated, the usage logs are updated and the primary QoS regulation server releases its QoS regulated path segments and in turn signals all secondary QoS regulation servers to release their service related capacity. The usage logs are then used to support a settlement system which collects payments from the user or the service provider, and which provides respective portions of the total compensation to the various financial entities that provided the QoS-regulated path segments.

In a memory, a program for internal control such as temperature compensation and calibration of a disk device and a program for scheduling the transfer timing and transfer size and effecting the control of data stream transfer between a computer and the disk device according to the scheduling are stored as firmware. A CPU controls a timer interrupting section, disk interface driver and internal interface driver according to the program to attain the internal control of the disk device and data transfer between the computer and the disk device. The timer interrupting section permits data transfer according to the scheduling by previously setting the interrupting timing by the CPU and generating an interruption according to the thus set timing.