The authors present a set of key quality of service (QOS) requirements and map these requirements onto a provisional QOS architecture (QOS-A) which has emerged from an experimental system designed and implemented at Lancaster. Because of the likely complexity of a fully general QOS-A, the scope of the discussion is limited to aspects of a QOS-A for the support of continuous media communications. The authors also concentrate on ATM at the network layer rather than considering the full range of multiservice networks. However, a generalised QOS-A should eventually be extensible to incorporate other areas of QOS provision such as real-time control systems, file transfer and real-time transaction processing