Goals of Next Week's ETSI Workshop on End-to-End Quality of Service

Sophia Antipolis (France), 22 February 2002

In its report to the ETSI General Assembly in November 2001, the ETSI NGN Starter Group outlined four areas on End-to-end QoS that require standardization work:

End-to-end QoS class definition for telephony
End-to-end QoS class definitions for multimedia
Specification of how to use lower layer QoS mechanism to achieve upper layer QoS within the network
Inter-domain lower layer QoS control

One of the recommendations was that ETSI Project TIPHON and ETSI Technical Committee STQ organize a workshop to report on the status quo, identify open issues and move those forward.

Note: TIPHON is a Trade Mark of ETSI currently registered in Europe and the US for the benefit of its Members.

The report of the NGN Starter Group is publicly available at the following URL: http://docbox.etsi.org/tech-org/ngn/doc ument/ngn/SG/70-Drafts/ga38pd18.zip

Extracts from the report:

End-to-end Quality of Service (QoS)

Standardization work is addressing end-to-end QoS issues for telephony grade speech before starting on other forms of traffic. The organisations currently involved are IETF, ETSI (TIPHON supported by STQ), ITU-T (SG11, 12, 16) and TTC.

Work is required to handle both the way in which different end system can reach agreement on the end-to-end QoS for a call and how the parameters set with this upper layer protocol can be used to control the lower layer, transport and access level QoS mechanisms.

For the issue of upper layer QoS control it is felt that a distinction can be made between telephony, where the work is now almost complete, and the wider topic of QoS for multimedia which needs work on both a "framework" and the definition of each individual media stream (video, white board, etc.).

Likewise the control of lower layer QoS mechanisms is best divided into two topics: a "vertical" protocol linking the upper and lower layer QoS mechanisms (diffserv, etc) and a lower layer "horizontal" mechanism to link the lower layer QoS control between different domains and networks.

It is likely that ETSI will need to work with different partners in each of these technical areas but that a "big picture" view must be maintained to ensure that the overall solution is to be useful.

NGN work on end-to-end QoS should concentrate on:
· Completion of End-to-end QoS class definition for telephony
· Definition of a new end-to-end multimedia QoS class definition framework and a method of registering QoS classes of individual media components
· Specification of how to use lower layer QoS mechanism to achieve upper layer QoS within the network
· Inter-domain lower layer QoS control
· End user perception of QoS

Primary partners for joint work with ETSI are ATMF, IETF (midcom, mmusic), ITU-T (SG11, 12, 13, 16), T1A1, TTC along with various multimedia fora.
See Annex D.2 for further details on end-to-end QoS issues.

Service platforms

Two of the key "new" aspects of NGN are the separation of service control and provision from the under-lying network and the extension of service control for telephony to cover multimedia. In an NGN compliant network NGN aware terminals must be able to interwork with each other independent of which service provider the terminal is connected to for the moment. This means that NGN compliant networks will require "End-to-End" service control on top of the call control independent of the underlying transport technology as well as presence and roaming techniques. This can be achieved either by using disparate technologies within a single Service Provision domain, or across multiple Service Providers domains.

The required service platforms should offer open interfaces, using APIs (such as PARLAY) and/or proxy servers, for third party service providers use, the resulting services will need to be accessible to end users as they roam between networks and, naturally, end-to-end services should be available between users connected to different networks using different service providers.

Work in this area is progressing, most notably in the joint ETSI/SPAN - 3GPP - PARLAY technical committee dealing with Open Service Architecture (OSA) for APIs, TIPHON for service roaming and the lessons learnt in 3GPP for mobile systems can be "generalised" to cover all NGN applications.

NGN work on service platforms should concentrate on:
· Definition of service control architectures covering both OSA APIs and proxy aspects
· Enhancement of mechanisms to support provision of services across multiple networks covering both service roaming and interconnectivity of services
· Development of mechanisms to support user presence and user control of service customisation and profiles
· Impact of user mobility on service platforms

Primary partners to work with ETSI include: 3GPP, PARLAY, JAIN, ITU-T (SG11, 16), IETF (megaco, sip).
See annex D.3 for further details on the topic of service platforms.

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