Quality of Service Management in an Integrated Mobile Voice/Data-Enabled Service Architecture

The System Adaptability Manager (SAM) is part of a Voice-Enabled Mobile Application Support Environment (VE-MASE). The latter is the core of the MOVE project, which supports the integration of realand non-real-time data in mobile multimedia applications. The SAM collects events and measurements from other VE-MASE components, performs real-time analysis of quality of service (QoS) parameters for realand non-real-time data, and delivers results to a Call Manager module. The SAM co-ordinates a per-stream QoS trading for the complete transmission medium, e.g., voice and data. The main contribution of this paper is a new classification of integrated QoS levels for voice/data collaboration which guides the operation of the SAM. Summary Section 1 recalls OnTheMove [1] [2] and the main objectives of its follow-up project MOVE [3] [4]. Section 2 characterises the purpose and functionality of the System Adaptability Manager (SAM) and its main advances over a namesake OnTheMove component. Section 3 first recapitulates a partition of five QoS classes for Voice over IP (VoIP) in networks that support interworking between PSTN and Internet Telephony. This leads to the identification of three super-classes of feasibility levels, distinguishing three basic kinds of voice quality. Then, these three classes are combined with a binary distinction concerning the feasibility of transmitting non-real-time data (typically, HTTP content). That finally yields six voice/data-integrated QoS classes by which the operation of the SAM can be controlled. We believe that distinguishing such quality classes is crucial for a user-friendly management of integrated voice-data collaboration, particularly for mobile users. To our knowledge, no such classification has ever been discussed in the literature so far.