Quality of Service Technologies for Next Generation Networks: A survey of standards and solutions to perform quality-oriented network management for multimedia applications

Telecommunication networks are constantly evolving toward multiservice, multidomain and multivendor architectures which are frequently referred to with Next Generation Networks (NGNs). These allow the operator to offer voice, data and video services on the same IP network infrastructure together with multimedia applications over wireless 3G networks. This means a substantial reduction of operational costs, making full use of a flexible and innovative platform built on the pre-existing backbone infrastructure. On the other hand, the deployment of multiservice networks brings new challenges in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) management and network policy control. The network traffic has to be prioritized, examining in some details the IP packets and identifying what specific requirements have to be guarantees. This book presents some quality-oriented technologies for multimedia applications in NGNs. Standards and solutions from the literature are described, proposing analysis and optimization scenarios.