End-to-end UMTS quality of service architecture for the support of real-time IP multimedia services in UMTS R5

3G promises to be an enabler for many new services: videoconferencing, interactive gaming, streaming, etc. Such applications are typically QoS (quality of service) sensitive. This requires new functionality in the UMTS QoS architecture. In 3GPP work on QoS is ongoing; the basic mechanisms are included in UMTS release 5, the more advanced features will be part of UMTS release 6. This document highlights UMTS QoS aspects. The main focus is on UMTS R5 as this release will introduce IP multimedia services. We clearly make the distinction between 3GPP stable decisions, topics under discussion within 3GPP, and the Alcatel position on the topics.