UE & network initiated QoS reservation in NGN and beyond

Next Generation Mobile Broadband Networks are designed to solve the large amount of expected mobile data traffic and to reduce the network costs at the same time. 3GPP has standardized the Evolved Packet System (EPS) in order to address such issues and provide connectivity, mobility, security and Quality-of-Service (QoS) on a connection between User Equipments (UE) and services through the access network. The 3GPP Evolved Packet Core (EPC) is the next big step in the evolution of mobile core networks following UMTS and HSPA(+) towards all-IP networks, which will be deployed in parallel to the current Long-Term-Evolution (LTE) roll-out. QoS management in NGN is historically operator controlled based on static rules differentiating voice from other data. This article analyses opportunities and challenges of UE & Network initiated QoS reservation in NGN and beyond. Furthermore, a subsystem for solving these QoS demands is integrated in the concepts of 3GPP EPC and finally prototyped in the Fraunhofer FOKUS and TUB OpenEPC toolkit.