Context-aware quality of service provisioning for real-time multimedia communications

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The growing interest in continuous media (audio/video) services, namely media streaming and multimedia conferencing over IP, coupled with technological advances in wireless and mobile networking, present new challenges and opportunities for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning. For example, some sports events are watched by millions of online users connected to the Internet in a variety of ways including high speed connections (Cable or ADSL), modems, or wireless connections. Accommodating such large number of continuous media users, network connection heterogeneity, and the different QoS requirements for multimedia applications represents significant challenges.       These challenges call for a new generation of QoS provisioning that takes into account the network and the application context to provide acceptable QoS. By incorporating contextual information in the QoS control process, it is possible to determine the reason for poor quality and take the most appropriate control action. Context information considered in this proposal include a variety of aspects including the location of a mobile device, the number of session users, the QoS requirements of the application, and the nature of the connection linking the user to the Internet.       The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is commonly used to deliver real-time multimedia over the Internet. The associated Real Time Control Protocol (RTCP) provides control and feedback information necessary for QoS monitoring in RTP sessions. The proposed research aims at analyzing further enhancements to RTCP to integrate it in a context-aware framework in a scalable and effective way.       The impact of this work is to provide a comprehensive quantitative understanding of the fundamental issues involved in providing context-aware QoS. Another important outcome is the development of a prototype implementation of a scalable context-aware QoS control architecture for the global Internet of the 21st century.