Advanced resource provisioning in context-sensitive converged networks

Mobile users are increasingly demanding multimedia content created specifically or at least tailored to cater for their needs and preferences. In this scope, context-sensitive converged network requires technologies beyond-standards to allow designing personalized multi-user service applications over heterogeneous communication systems. The Context Casting (C-CAST) project designed a context-sensitive converged network architecture to support personalized multi-user sessions with Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed towards group of multi-homed users simultaneously, and in their wireless network technologies. However, the per-flow driven signalling approach of Legacy C-CAST introduces performance penalties since the signalling load exponentially increases with the number of flow admissions. Thus, this paper proposes the Advanced C-CAST, which re-architects the Legacy C-CAST with over-provisioning centric network resource control to improve performance and reliability. The evaluation of Advanced C-CAST demonstrate its benefits against Legacy C-CAST by optimizing overall networking costs (signalling load and latency) while keeping users with best quality perception (packet loss and propagation delay) experience.