End-to-end quality of service provisioning through an integrated management system for multimedia content delivery

Next generation networks will be complex, interconnecting different technologies, and architectures (IP, DVB-T/S, UMTS, GSM/GPRS, etc.) across a multitude of software and hardware platforms for offering a large number of value-added services including multimedia, audio–visual, etc. One of the major requirements for the successful and wide deployment of such services is the efficient transmission of performance sensitive digital items (i.e., audio, video, and image) over a broad range of bandwidth-constrained wired/wireless access/core/distribution networks. This paper presents an approach to the management and provisioning of end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) in next generation networks (IP and non-IP networks) that is being developed in the IST ENTHRONE1 project. The primary goal of this project is to provide a solution for seamless access to multimedia content with end-to-end QoS support through integrated management of content, networks and terminals. The adopted methodology in providing end-to-end QoS is through an integrated management in the context of MPEG-21 framework for managing services at both customer and provider levels using Service Level Agreements (SLA) concept and provisioning network resources for satisfying the customer QoS demands as well as meeting the QoS requirements of multimedia contents.