Control of multi-user services in mobile heterogeneous environments

Abstract

Nowadays the Internet provides a wide variety of multi-user communication services over heterogeneous environments, where services are destined for large audiences, independently of the location of users and of the moment when those services are requested. Having this in mind, this paper proposes a QoS Architecture for Multimedia Mobile Multi-user (Q3M) support, to allow mobile operators to control the dissemination of content to large groups of heterogeneous mobile users, independently of the location of the mobile devices. The proposed architecture is structured in three control functions: the Mobile Multi-user control function that provides the required multicast and unicast connectivity, the Service Class control function that dynamically allocates resources of network classes to multicast traffic, and the Session Management control function that manages the dissemination of content to multiple users. Our conceptual analysis reveals that the Q3M architecture provides the key components for the support of multi-user services over heterogeneous mobile environments.