Management solutions for QoS support over the entire audio-visual service distribution chain

✍ Scribed by George Kormentzas; Charalabos Skianis

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 51 KB
• Volume: 17
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1055-7148
• DOI: 10.1002/nem.666

✦ Synopsis

The great challenge of networks and services convergence has been faced for several years by service providers, network operators, equipment manufacturers and other telecom vendors. The explosion of broadband and simultaneously the launch of 3G mobile networks have accelerated this convergence, leading to an all-IP network, delivering voice, data, content, video communications, video broadcasting, in one world, a real IP multimedia world of services. 3GPP and 3GPP2 have produced a specification convergence framework, which enables real multimedia convergence on an all IP-based infrastructure. The core element of this specification framework is the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), which provides a workable and coherent solution for both fixed and wireless networks for delivering a new generation of converged services. This opportunity is rising fast, and is largely contributing to the wide, although recent, recognition of IMS as the future direction of Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC).

A key element for the successful mass market provision of audio-visual services in the context of an FMC environment, which would produce revenue for content/service providers and network operators, is the identification and implementation of management solutions that can guarantee end-to-end QoS delivery over heterogeneous networks and terminals. Currently, there is no complete and unified solution that enables the end-to-end delivery of services over various types of networks at a guaranteed quality level, although the problem has been investigated by many players in the field. Only partial solutions have been proposed so far that can provide end-to-end QoS only in special cases, e.g. for certain types of networks, for a single network operator, for specific types of services or for certain terminals.

This special issue is devoted to the research activities within industry and academia toward the identification of management solutions that cover the entire audio-visual service distribution chain, including content generation and protection, distribution across heterogeneous access and core networks and reception at various types of user terminals. The aim is not to impose a strategy on each individual entity of the chain, but to harmonize their functionality, in order to support an end-to-end QoS architecture over heterogeneous networks, applied to a variety of audio-visual services, which are delivered at various user terminals. The special issue contains five papers, which have been selected through a careful review process.

The first paper, 'Enhancing multimedia streaming over existing wireless LAN technology using the Unified Link Layer API' by Tim Farnham, Mahesh Sooriyabandara and Costas Efthymiou, kicks off the special issue by describing how multimedia streaming scenarios can be enhanced by cross-layer interaction, and in particular link performance information and configuration options provided by a recently developed Unified Link Layer API (ULLA). It provides results of an experimental implementation developed for this purpose in a WLAN environment.

At the same topic of cross-layer optimization, the second paper, 'A heuristic cross-layer mechanism for real-time traffic over IEEE 802.16 networks' by D. Triantafyllopoulou, N. Passas, A. Salkintzis and A. Kaloxylos, proposes and evaluates a cross-layer mechanism that can improve real-time QoS provisioning over IEEE 802.16 metropolitan area networks. This mechanism utilizes information provided by the physical and MAC layers and using a heuristic algorithm it derives new operational parameters for the physical and application layers, which can improve the performance of real-time applications.