A demonstration infrastructure for E2E QoS services provisioning

The content delivery chain encompasses content creation, delivery and consumption. To support this, the content has to be identified, described, generated, delivered, managed and protected. Furthermore, content/services of different format will be distributed over heterogeneous networks and delivered on a variety of user terminals. The scarce resource of bandwidth needs to be dynamically managed and the QoS should remain within predefined limits, accepted by the end users. This will enable the provision of network and terminal resources on demand to form user communities, where the content can be created, protected and shared, always with the agreed/contracted quality, reliability and flexibility. It is therefore imperative to develop an integrated solution that is able to manage the functionality of various entities in the digital information distribution chain, from content/service generation to user terminals, using heterogeneous networks, comprised of wired (IP based core network) and wireless (DVB, WLAN, WiMAX) segments, and based on the end-to-end QoS approach. The aim of this work is to propose and to build a suitable testbed environment where such a solution, namely the approach of ENTHRONE (end-to-end QoS through integrated management of content, networks and terminals), can be tested and demonstrated. In this respect, an operational networking infrastructure is outlined which can be used as a test bed to demonstrate, in real conditions, the functionalities and the performance of ENTHRONE approach to E2E QoS provisioning.