Abstract

The Mobile Communication environment has changed dramatically from providing pure voice service exclusive to cellular users to providing multimedia services to users with access to an all-IP infrastructure via heterogeneous access technologies. IP in next generation networks will provide efficient and cost-effective interworking between different systems. Therefore, IP QoS provisioning will play a key role in satisfying mobile users' expectations on seamless access to multimedia services of desired quality anywhere and anytime. However, heterogeneity of the systems and diversity of the services challenge IP QoS provisioning schemes in multiple aspects. It is one of the most critical challenges to maintain QoS level to mobile users when handoff occurs. QoS control communications must interwork with various management entities to ensure the minimization of service disruption during handoff. In this thesis, we propose a generic multi-panel QoS control communications framework to provide a guideline for optimizing control communications between various functionalities and entities. The framework is an effective platform to analyze control communications from two perspectives, intra-panel and inter-panel. Specifically, we propose a novel MIPv6 handoff scheme in the QoS panel to smooth the procedure of QoS updates during a MIPv6 handoff. Vertical handoff is the most challenging event in the framework. The two key problems of QoS control communications are QoS domain switch and automatic service adjustment between different access networks. We propose a QoS control architecture in the QoS panel to address these issues. Both analytical results and simulation results have demonstrated that the proposed schemes for different events can promote the efficiency of intra-panel control communications in the QoS Panel. The direct benefits are greatly-reduced QoS configuration delay during handoff and smooth end-to-end QoS provisioning in terms of different measurements