Path-directed signaling usage in the Internet

The real-time nature and complexity of multimedia applications, the availability of Internet connectivity from everywhere in the globe and deployments of heterogeneous application hosts, increases the challenges for widespread deployments of multimedia applications. These applications need to receive the appropriate quality of service (QoS), without topology awareness, through firewalls and network address translators (NATs). This document analyses how path-directed network signaling protocols can be used to meet the challenges imposed on multimedia application deployments. It demonstrates how standards organizations can minimize the proliferation of signaling protocols intended to control network services, especially the ones requiring network topology knowledge.