End-to-end QoS provisioning in mobile heterogeneous networks

The ability to provide seamless and adaptive quality of service (QoS) in a heterogeneous environment is the key to the success of the next generation wireless communication systems. There has been a considerable amount of QoS research going on recently but the main portion still occurred in the context of individual architecture components and much less progress has been made in addressing the issue of an overall QoS architecture for the mobile Internet. In this article the state-of-the-art QoS techniques and standardization activities are summarized. Important challenges in building a ubiquitous QoS framework over the heterogeneous environment are examined in detail. Then a three-plane QoS framework based on QoS signaling architecture and policy framework is proposed to provide seamless support for future applications.