Quality of service management for the UMTS mobile communication system

In any wireless system there is clearly a very scarce resource, which is the available bandwidth. 3G mobile Communications Systems intend to provide several classes of services at different bit rates while assuring a Quality of Service (QoS) for each one. The only way to harmonise these two contradictory points (scarce bandwidth and a stringent QoS) is with a proper management of the available radio resources. This project aims at providing advanced Quality of Service (QoS) management solutions for the support of integrated voice and data services within the context of Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS). Even thought, the first implementations of UMTS are mainly focused on an efficient provision of circuit switched services (Release 99 of 3GPP specs), and packet switched services are still considered as complementary, future evolutions in UMTS system (Release 2000 and further) are focusing in an all-IP end to end architecture, and consequently the packet switched services in the air interface will gain momentum. In that context, the optimisation of capacity in a multiservice environment is going to be faced definitively and the intelligent management of the radio resources is essential in order to fulfil the required QoS. To asses the project objectives, three complementary and at the same time concurrent approaches have been selected, namely: 

•  Analysis of All-IP architectures for the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN)  
• Evaluation of the QoS algorithms performances by means of simulations
• Validation of the benefits of the developed QoS algorithms by means of a testbed able to manage multimedia IP based applications.