Session initiation protocol (SIP) and quality of service (QoS) interaction for Internet multimedia applications

Although there have been many developments to provide QoS in the Internet, users may experience limitations on how and when to apply QoS. Most of the time, the communication in the Internet is best-effort. In this paper, QoS support for interactive multimedia sessions (e.g., voiceover-IP, video-conference) is addressed by looking into the interaction of session control signaling and QoS mechanisms. First, we review current research approaches to this interaction between session control signaling and QoS. Then, in an effort to provide an easy and flexible way for applications to efficiently use the underlying network QoS mechanisms, we propose a lightweight call setup signaling scheme that allows the the interaction of a session control signaling - the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) - and the Differentiated Services QoS architecture. By implementing the proposed scheme in a testbed, performance results show improvements in the quality of high-quality video applications with minimum impact to end users, specially in terms of call setup overhead.