Network convergence and QoS for future multimedia services in the VISION project

The emerging use of real-time 3D-based multimedia applications imposes strict quality of service (QoS) requirements on both access and core networks. These requirements and their impact to provide end-to-end 3D videoconferencing services have been studied within the Spanish-funded VISION project, where different scenarios were implemented showing an agile stereoscopic video call that might be offered to the general public in the near future. In view of the requirements, we designed an integrated access and core converged network architecture which provides the requested QoS to end-to-end IP sessions. Novel functional blocks are proposed to control core optical networks, the functionality of the standard ones is redefined, and the signaling improved to better meet the requirements of future multimedia services. An experimental test-bed to assess the feasibility of the solution was also deployed. In such test-bed, set-up and release of end-to-end sessions meeting specific QoS requirements are shown and the impact of QoS degradation in terms of the user perceived quality degradation is quantified. In addition, scalability results show that the proposed signaling architecture is able to cope with large number of requests introducing almost negligible delay

SIP-empowered optical networks for future IT services and applications

This article presents a novel application-aware network architecture for evolving and emerging IT services and applications. It proposes to enrich an optical burst switching network with a session control layer that can close the gap between application requests and network control. The session control layer is implemented using the session initiation protocol, giving birth to what is called a SIP-OBS architecture. The article discusses the important added value of this architecture, and shows that it may support a number of end-to-end resource discovery and reservation strategies (for both network and non-network resources). Finally, it presents a testbed implementation where this approach was experimentally validated