SUMMARYThe support of quality of service (QoS) in the Internet has become one of the most important topics within the Internet community. The introduction of the Integrated Services (IntServ) and the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architectures was a major breakthrough in this direction. Enhanced by the Bandwidth Broker concept, DiffServ aims to provide QoS in the Internet through the prioritization of some IP flows over others. However, up to now the DiffServ architecture lacks a standard mechanism for the interaction between users/applications and the Bandwidth Brokers (BB), so that end-to-end QoS can be achieved.In this paper we present a distributed middleware architecture for the transparent support of QoS in the Internet. The paper focuses on bridging the gap that currently exists between applications and the network and presents the end-user application toolkit (EAT). The EAT middleware provides a framework for the presentation of network services to users, the description and selection of QoS parameters, the forwarding of reservation requests and the verification of the accredited QoS level. Through the concept of application profiles, it aims to support QoS for legacy applications, that is, commercial applications that cannot be modified to support QoS.