A framework for QoS provisioning in unified communications networks

Telepresence, device independent communication, unified reachability and UC-enabled business processes are all advantages of employing Unified Communication (UC) in today's networks. Users can freely roam between networks and change the type of the devices they use and still enjoy the same type of service and quality they are expecting from their original network. Also UC improves business productivity by increasing the chances for real-time communication and collaboration. UC functionality is mainly implemented at the application layer and is manifested in the UC applications and services offered to end user, in the UC call and session control and UC call routing. To enable all these services and applications at the application layer, the network layer with all its comprising components must ensure stringent Quality of Service (QoS) as mandated by the UC services at the application layer. QoS provisioning in UC networks is sophisticated considering the diverse types of networks involved, the diverse levels of quality for the same service/application as they arrive from different networks, the types of services/applications sharing the same session and finally the performance parameters of those services or applications. In this paper, we introduce our UC QoS provisioning framework that receives packets belonging to different networks and sessions, classifies them, maps them using our mapping algorithm to a set of proposed UC classes, schedules them with our proposed queuing and scheduling scheme and then maps them back to the native classes belonging to different heterogeneous networks.