Application driven Policy Based Resource Management for IP multimedia subsystems

Policy based resource management will form the cornerstone of service differentiation that will drive IMS service deployment. While the IMS specifications are largely finalized, the policy based QoS provisioning architecture still faces many deployment challenges including flexible, application driven policy control, end to end policy provisioning and policy refinement. To accelerate the maturity of this technology open test-beds are necessary to expose the complex systems to an open set of developers. This paper proposes a multilayered policy control architecture that extends the general resource management function being standardized; this extended architecture gives application developers greater control over the way their services are treated in the transport layer. Furthermore the architecture is implemented in the form of a 3GPP compliant, open source and freely distributed test-bed architecture - the open areas of policy representation, application-policy interaction, policy profiling and policy refinement are addressed. This open test-bed will serve to foster innovation in the field, increase collaborative co-operation and accelerate the maturity of these technologies. The framework is subjected to vigorous validation and evaluation tests - while the effects the architecture has on session setup delay and signaling overhead are not insignificant they are found to be acceptable.