A simple QoS signaling protocol for mobile hosts in the integrated services Internet

With advances in packet routing technology, and resource reservation protocols, the Internet is expected to provide ubiquitous integrated transport of speech, audio, video, and other real-time multimedia data in addition to the current best effort data traffic. Such integrated transport will also need to be supported for the increasing number of mobile users who access the Internet over wireless access networks, using Mobile-IP to retain continual IP connectivity. We present a simple quality of service (QoS) signaling protocol for mobile users in an integrated service Internet. The protocol works by combining pre-provisioned RSVP tunnels with Mobile IP. Our protocol, even-though simple, captures the essence of QoS provisioning for wireless and mobile networks. The wireless medium provides a completely different medium than wires, and therefore one´s expectations from it should be different. Service quality is inherently mobility dependent, and intermittent disconnections are bound to happen. It is not the signaling protocol´s task to completely overcome or conceal transient conditions from applications, but rather applications should try to adapt. Our approach can be easily implemented today with minimal changes to other components of the Internet architecture. We also evaluate the application level performance impact of the QoS provisioning delays associated with our protocol on a prototypical packet speech application with various playout buffering strategies, and compare against the performance of the ordinary RSVP protocol suite with Mobile IP