In recent years, distributed IT applications were developed which pose explicit requirements on the quality of end-to-end connections between the participating parties. Examples include voice-over-IP, video conferencing etc. Hence, those applications' functionality is significantly influenced by the underlying network infrastructures on

which applications build upon. Services offered by networks must therefore meet certain criteria of quality - they have to provide and enforce quality-of-service (QoS). For this reason, different architectures have been and still are being developed to realize QoS on the network level. While such architectures have proven to be functional in principle for homogeneous networks of single providers, the situation is completely different when it comes to interconnecting

autonomous or/and heterogeneous networks. Today, no QoS-enabled network services are offered which span multiple provider domains. But this is expected and necessary for the future, last but not least because of the pressure imposed by the application level. As there is no universal QoS architecture on the horizon to become accepted globally, ways have to be found to handle heterogeneity in a network

of networks.

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When reviewing existing work in the field, it becomes evident that most approaches are limited to specific architectures or certain services. What is still missing is a universal internetworking architecture which could be applied in any situation and to any QoS architecture. The existence of such a generic architecture seems to be uncertain regarding the complexity of the task and the broad spectrum of QoS architectures which have to covered.

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This thesis strictly follows a service-oriented approach which can be summarized as "a generic way for gaining a specific solution". The approach consists of two major steps. The starting point of the first step are the QoS network services which are to be coupled as well as the QoS architectures these services are built upon. Initially, a normalized representation of the architectures is gained by modeling. In doing so, static and dynamic aspects of QoS architectures are considered. Afterwards, the modeling of QoS network services itself takes place and is based on the models for architectures. The whole modeling process creates a normalized starting point for the second major step. It consists of a generic methodology for gaining specific solutions to solve the coupling problem for individual cases. In this step the necessary architectural building blocks and the required workflows for the coupling are identified. The modeling as well as the methodology are strictly service-oriented, especially in considering the whole service life cycle for both parts.

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The generic model and the methodology are illustrated by a series of examples which are derived from real world scenarios. The thesis' results are supported by an analysis of different business use cases, e.g. bid invitation, estimation of effort etc.