QoS traffic mapping for a multi-participant session in unified communications networks

Unified communications (UC) offers users an uninterrupted communication service regardless of the device which the user is using, the heterogeneous networks to which he might be connected, the physical and logical context in which he exists and the diversity of QoS requirements by different session participants and services. Providing and maintaining an acceptable level of QoS, as perceived by all session participants, is a major issue in UC as well as in next generation networks (NGN) at large. QoS provisioning in such networks is a multi stage problem that starts from receiving the traffic, classifying it, mapping it to the appropriate UC class and finally queuing and scheduling it for delivery. In this paper, we introduce a novel mapping technique that accepts traffic belonging to a diverse set of applications coming from different networks and then maps it to one of eight UC classes based on the QoS requirements of each of the session's participants. The proposed mapping algorithm performs this by calculating an agreed upon set of QoS performance metrics and then map this set to the closest UC class. Evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed mapping technique.