A Generic Service Management Architecture for Multimedia Multipoint Communications

Abstract

With rapid advances in multimedia processing technologies, and in high bandwidth network technologies, new kinds of multimedia applications are now emerging. These applications require real-time, multimedia, and multipoint interactions involving multiple communicating entities and leading to a need of more sophisticated communication control functionalities. In this paper, a generic integrated and flexible service management architecture for multimedia multipoint communications is proposed, which offers three main generic functions, namely Quality of Service (QoS) negotiation, QoS monitoring and control, and session management.

Service management: from definition to information modeling

“…Policies relating to agreements between the service provider and other parties such as the network operators are also considered. Relying on [GZH95], among functions needed for managing services are QoS negotiation, QoS monitoring and control, and session management. Concerning access points, they provide gates to the service.…”

“…Every LCG relates to a specific medium, as proposed in [GZH95], in order to separate the processing of the media involved in a service session. Doing so helps deal with situations wherein some session end-parties are not able to process information related to certain media.…”