Comparison of End-to-End QoS Reservation Schemes in Next Generation Networks

Abstract

Increasing demand for network services has led the network providers and equipment vendors to consider ways to provide better Quality of Service (QoS) for these services. In the Internet today, there is a little or no interaction between the network access providers and the network service providers. Several organizations such as, the Telecommunication standardization sector of International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) are involved in the standardization of a general QoS control architecture to bring the network access and application services to one common framework known as the Next Generation Network (NGN). In this thesis, we have studied the establishment of a connection with end-to-end QoS assurances that spans over a number of heterogeneous wireless and wireline networks, namely, a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), a Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), a Metro Ethernet, a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS)-based and a Differentiated Services (Diffserv)-based Wide Area Networks (WANs). The end-to-end QoS architecture that we have studied follows the ITU-T NGN QoS control architecture where the connection setup signaling uses the 3GPP IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) signaling. Within this context, we have studied the QoS interactions between the component network architectures, developed a mapping of QoS parameters across the various networking technologies, and identified the four different schemes for QoS reservation. These schemes are: local segmentation push scheme, local segmentation pull scheme, end-to-end push scheme and end-to-end pull scheme. Using simulation techniques, we compared the connection setup time performance of these four schemes. Our results indicate that the pull mode schemes that involve the user terminals to initiate the QoS reservation perform better than the push mode schemes that involve the IMS core network elements to initiate QoS reservation. This combined with the advantage of the localized QoS reservation makes the local segmentation pull mode QoS reservation scheme has a lower connection setup time compared to other schemes.