QoS framework for Mobile-to-Mobile multimedia streaming applications

Provisioning high profile multimedia applications over the bandwidth-constrained cellular networks is not simply straight forward. Quality of Service (QoS) has always been a debatable issue in this regard. Network over-provisioning can be a solution but not an economical one. Therefore, the operators have to employ more sophisticated control and policy enforcement mechanism in order to ensure the quality of individual services running over their network. More precisely, they require an efficient way to perform service differentiation and applying QoS policies accordingly. The paper proposes a QoS framework for an existing Mobile Server Platform (MSP), which is envisaged as the foundation of M2M (Mobile-to-Mobile) service networks over the operator IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) network. The paper enfolds that how the proposed QoS framework operates in the user registration, session establishment and multimedia delivery phase of an ongoing multimedia session. A promising feature of the proposed framework is to allow the cellular operators to employ QoS control based on the user profiles classification. Hence, a systematic approach is adopted to study the behaviour of a video streaming prototype based on different network settings and various user profiles.