Specification of a software architecture for capability and quality-of-service negotiations and session establishment for distributed multimedia applications

• US 20060294112A1
• Filed: 10/15/2003
• Published: 12/28/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 10/23/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Company KG (Nokia Corporation), Sony Deutschland GmbH (Sony Group Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Company KG (Nokia Corporation)
• Inventors: Mandato, Davide, Guenkoba-luy, Teodora
• Granted Patent: US 8,549,143 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1069 Session establishment or de-establishment
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1096 Supplementary features, e.g. call forwarding or call holding systems providing special services or facilities to telephony subscribers H04M3/42
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1101 Session protocols
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/1104 Session initiation protocol [SIP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 65/80 Responding to QoS
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/24 Negotiation of communication capabilities

Abstract

The underlying invention generally relates to the field of mobile computing in a wireless mobile networking environment with distributed multimedia applications (130). More specifically, it is directed to the field of Quality-of-Service (QOS) management for adaptive real-time services running on mobile devices and an End-to-End Negotiation Protocol (E2ENP) based on a novel usage of a session-layer protocol (SIP) in conjunction with extensions of a session description protocol implementation (SDP, SDPng) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) for defining user profile and terminal capability information which allow to enforce and use hierarchical QOS Contract specifications. Thereby, said End-to-End Negotiation Protocol (E2ENP) is applied to derive negotiable information, which enables a prenegotiation, fast negotiation and a fast, dynamic re-negotiation of the end-to-end quality and capabilities for a telecommunication session, for multiple configurations of two or a multiplicity of end peers and/or middleware in a consistent, reliable, and incremental way by enabling the mobile applications to efficiently and timely react to QoS violations. Furthermore, the invention pertains to the concept and realization of a novel E2ENP User Agent (128) which encapsulates the signaling part of E2ENP and expresses the information to be negotiated in an interchangeable format in such a way that heterogeneous applications (130) can easily agree on a reference model applied to orchestrate local, peer, and network resources according to the preferences and profiles of the respective user in a coordinated manner. According to one embodiment of the invention, the employed E2ENP sessionlayer protocol Application Programming Interfaces (101a-e) are independent of the actually used session-layer protocol and session description protocol implementations.

Claims

1. A system offering an Application Programming Interface (101b) for multi-stream multimedia applications (130) running on at least two registered end peers participating in a mo-bile telecommunication session and/or middleware (130) being connected to a mobile network, said system (128) providing guaranteed end-to-end quality and resource capabilities using the concept of concatenated E2ENP phases and being adapted to provide

a pre-negotiation of a multiplicity of alternative capabilities and QoS Contracts,

management of leased pre-negotiated information,

session establishment between said end peers with negotiation of a multiplicity of alternative capabilities and/or QoS Contracts, and

a dynamic re-negotiation of the end-to-end quality and capabilities,

wherein the information to be negotiated is expressed in an interchangeable format so as to allow said multi-stream multimedia applications (130) to agree on a specific reference model of the negotiated information, which can then be used for dynamically configuring Finite State Machines (106) to orchestrate local, peer, and network resources according to the preferences and profiles of the respective user.

2. A system according to claim 1, characterized in that said system (128) is internally decomposed into a set of Finite State Machines (106) coordinating the internal processes and Application Programming Interfaces (101a-e).

3. A system according to claim 2, characterized in that said multi-stream multimedia applications (130) and/or said middleware (130) use said Finite State Machines (106) for a dynamic configuration.

4. A system according to claim 1, characterized in that it is designed to support multiple concurrent users.

6. A system according to claim 1, characterized by a two-stage E2ENP Cache (104) for managing negotiation object identifiers in order to decouple the identification scheme of a specific application (130) and/or middleware (130) from the one specified for the E2ENP by non-persistently storing and retrieving

E2ENP session identifiers referring to the respective mo-bile telecommunication session,

the E2ENP session identifiers referring to the respective Service Provider (110) handled by the Finite State Machine (106) of the unit (128), and

the E2ENP session identifiers referring to the respective Service User (130) handled by any application (130) and/or middleware (130) using the services offered by said unit (128).

7. A system according to claim 1, characterized in that the unit (128) is adapted to

pre-cache information during the execution of a given E2ENP pre-negotiation or negotiation procedure, wherein the pre-cached data remains cached for future reference during a later E2ENP session once the given procedure has been successfully completed, and

to cache information which can be applied as a reference to data, which has already been (pre-)negotiated among the end peers, during a new E2ENP pre-negotiation or negotiation procedure.

8. A system according to claim 1, characterized by E2ENP session-layer protocol APIs (101a-e) being independent of the actually used session-layer protocol and the session description protocol implementations.

9. A system according to claim 1, characterized by a Factory API (101e) representing an interface (IFS) between the unit (128) and a Factory instance (114) used for encoding an E2ENP session description.

10. A system according to claim 1, characterized by a Parser API (101d) representing an interface (IF4) between the unit (128) and a Parser instance (112) needed for decoding an E2ENP session description.

11. A system according to claim 9, characterized in that the Parser instance (112) and the Factory instance (114) can be configured independently by using the same protocol.

12. A system according to claim 1, based on a novel usage of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) in conjunction with extensions of the Session Description Protocol (SDP) or Session Description Protocol—

Next Generation (SDPng), respectively.

13. A system according to claim 12, characterized in that the session-layer protocol and the Session Description Protocol (SDP) or Session Description Protocol—

Next Generation (SDPng), respectively, are independently configurable.

24. A telecommunications network, characterized in that said telecommunications network comprises a system (128) according to claim 1.

25. A computer software program product, characterized in that said computer software program product implements a system (128) according to claim 1 when running on a mobile terminal in a wireless network environment.

5. A system for establishing a session between two entities in a telecommunications network, said unit (128) comprising the following Application Programming Interfaces (APIs):

a Management API (101a) representing an interface (IF

     1) between the unit (128) and an entity (102) managing it,

an API (101b) representing an interface (IF2) between the unit (128), middleware (130) and/or an application (130) using services offered by the unit (128),

a generic session-layer protocol API (101c) representing an interface (IF3) between the unit (128) and a User Agent (110) of a session-layer protocol.

14. A negotiation method providing guaranteed end-to-end quality and resource capabilities for multi-stream multimedia applications (130) running on at least two registered end peers participating in a mobile telecommunication session and/or middleware (130) being connected to a mobile network to dynamically adapt to changes in transmission quality, which is based on extensions of the End-to-End Negotiation Protocol (E2ENP), said method providing

a pre-negotiation of a multiplicity of alternative capabilities and QoS Contracts,

management of leased pre-negotiated information,

session establishment between said end peers with negotiation of a multiplicity of alternative capabilities and/or QoS Contracts and coordination of terminal and network re-source reservations, and

a fast, dynamic re-negotiation of the end-to-end quality and capabilities using the concept of concatenated E2ENP phases, characterized by the step of expressing the information to be negotiated in an inter-changeable format so as to allow said multi-stream multimedia applications (130) to agree on a specific reference model of the negotiated information, which can then be used for dynamically configuring Finite State Machines (106) to orchestrate local, peer, and network resources according to the preferences and profiles of the respective user.

15. A negotiation method according to claim 14, characterized in that the resource reservation coordination process is based on a multi-phase call-setup mechanism that makes network QoS and security establishment a precondition to sessions initiated by the session-layer protocol and described by a session description protocol implementation, wherein network resource reservation mechanisms are deployed before the session is started,

wherein Indication (Ind) and Confirmation (Cfm) primitives, which are invoked by the unit (218) to the registered client side of the middleware (130) in order to respectively indicate the arrival of a particular message exchange or confirm the conclusion of a given message exchange, are an integral part of the E2ENP and mapped to a E2ENP “

qosdef”

section (1300), which either specifies capabilities of a peer or de-fines validated QoS contracts that have been validated by en-tities using the unit (128), and its corresponding negotiation process.

16. A negotiation method according to claim 14, characterized by a mandatory synchronization of the reservation processes between different peers according to an “

Economy Principle”

.

17. A negotiation method according to claim 14, characterized in that in case no network resource reservation is conducted by the end peer at the Offerer side, the unit (128) of another end peer acting as an Answerer determines this case by examining the preconditions made by the Offerer and correspondingly enables the Answerer to transparently deal with resource reservation coordination.

18. A negotiation method according to claim 14, characterized by the step of allowing both end-to-end and segmented reservations, wherein network resource reservation is done locally on beforehand with no cost and/or major impact on session establishment.

19. A negotiation method according to claim 14, characterized in that in case a multi-stream multimedia application (130) or middleware (130) wishes to execute a “

pre-reservation”

of net-work resources, the E2ENP signaling gives the right timing to said application (130) or middleware (130), respectively, thereby informing it when the resource reservations at all sides have been accomplished.

20. A negotiation method according to claim 14, characterized by a new E2ENP syntax which allows that E2ENP addresses (600) identifying different E2ENP users, which are passed on by the applied pre-negotiation and negotiation primitives and mapped to the specific syntax used by the underlying session-layer protocol that is used for piggybacking E2ENP information, are independent of said session-layer protocol and/or the respective transport protocol used underneath by the unit (128).

21. A contention resolution method used for a negotiation method according to claim 14, which is applied in case of two peers initiating E2ENP phases at the same time,

wherein the E2ENP UA (128) does not only include the session identifier sent by an Offerer but also a hash thereof as a substitute for said session identifier in any subsequent session-layer protocol message which takes the IP address of the computing unit where the E2ENP UA (128) is active into account and a time stamp, which is applied whenever a negotiation or pre-negotiation phase is initiated.

22. A contention resolution method according to claim 21, characterized in that in case two peers are not already involved in multimedia sessions, each peer compares the hash it has generated with the one received from the peer, and the peer with the biggest value is automatically chosen as Offerer and thus proceeds with the pre-negotiation or negotiation phase as such, whereas the other peer automatically moves to the Answerer mode.

23. A contention resolution method according to claim 21, characterized in that in case two peers are already involved in multimedia sessions, the peer whose request has been rejected applies an unplanned re-negotiation procedure after the peer whose re-quest has been accepted has completed its negotiation procedure.