A unifying architecture for publish-subscribe services in the next generation IP networks

Abstract

Next generation IP networks are envisioned to be heterogeneous, to provide a wide variety of services, and to support mobility of users with distinct requirements. Moreover, mobile communications are expected to expand from telephony to publish-subscribe services, such as real-time multimedia. With this goal, the University of Coimbra is working with DoCoMo Euro-Labs on a unifying control architecture for multimedia publish-subscribe services over an IP-based mobile system, where our proposal aims to control the quality of service and mobility across heterogeneous networks with no perceived service degradation to the users. This article highlights the requirements of a control architecture for publish-subscribe services, and presents our proposal, called QoS Architecture for Multi-user Mobile Multimedia (Q3M). The main components and functionality of the Q3M architecture are analysed from the user and network perspectives, and some simulation results concerning the analysis of the session setup times are presented.