A Study on End-to-End QoS Provision for Multimedia Services in Beyond 3G Convergence Networks

In Beyond 3G networks interworking with external IP-based networks, end-to-end QoS provision is a critical issue. To facilitate this, 3GPP proposes the policy-based network management and suggests IntServ and DiffServ as policy enforcement means. Even if DiffServ is preferable to IntServ in scalability and configurability, it has the limitation of not being able to leverage multiple paths, hence undesirable in the network utilization aspect. In this paper, we propose DiffServ-aware Multiple Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) as a policy enforcement means. It enables to provide differentiated levels of QoS as well as to improve network utilization by splitting packets over multiple paths. It is also able to avoid the per-flow packet ordering problem occurring when splitting a flow into multiple paths by using a hashing-based scheme. We verify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme by the NS-2 based simulation.