Unified communications (UC) offers users an uninterrupted communication service regardless of the device which the user is using, the heterogeneous networks to which he might be connected, the physical and logical context in which he exists and the diversity of QoS requirements by different session participants and services. Providing and maintaining an acceptable level of QoS, as perceived by all session participants, is a major issue in UC as well as in next generation networks (NGN) at large. QoS provisioning in such networks is a multi stage problem that starts from receiving the traffic, classifying it, mapping it to the appropriate UC class and finally queuing and scheduling it for delivery.In this paper, we introduce a novel mapping technique that accepts traffic belonging to a diverse set of applications coming from different networks and then maps it to one of eight UC classes based on the QoS requirements of each of the session's participants. The proposed mapping algorithm performs this by calculating an agreed upon set of QoS performance metrics and then map this set to the closest UC class. Evaluation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed mapping technique.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.