End-2-End QoS Provisioning in UMTS networks

Haibo Wang Devendra Prasad

January 3, 2005

Chapter 1 Overview and Problem Denition

1.1 Introduction
There is a growing interest in the end-to-end Quality of Service(E2E QoS) provision in both the standards for 3G mobile radio systems(in 3GPP/3GPP2) and for IP infrastructure(in IETF), which reects the trend that as the mobile Internetlike services get more and more popular, the market requires the real-time and quality-assured services provision by the mobile communication world which is going to be a convergence of all-IP backbone[3GPP R5] and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) radio access network.

UMTS has been designed to support integrated services no matter voice, data, video, etc. Among them broadband multi-media services is regarded as the key to UMTS success. Some most important services require UMTS to provide bandwidth on demand, mixed trafc types, efcient network transport and/or guaranteed QoS features, and those services may be roughly divided into realtime and non-realtime with quite different demand to the UMTS network.

In the convergence of IP and UMTS environment, two possible key research topics concern QoS and mobility management (Mobile IP). This project focus on the QoS issue especially for realtime services in IP/UMTS combined domain from a End to End point of view. Related concepts are reviewed, well-known approaches in both Internet and UMTS system to provide QoS are described, and a new E2E QoS provision mechanism is proposed. 2

1.2 Quality of service architecture

Generally, Quality of Service is a set of requirements to be met so that a service or application can be delivered to the end-user in a quantitative and qualitative service level. The QoS level can be quantied by packet loss probability, guaranteed bandwidth, end-to-end (E2E) delay and jitter, reect how the trafc ow through a network. Put it in another way, QoS can be seen as the degree of satisfaction of an end-user for an delivered service. The concept above leads to the basic idea of QoS, to distinct trafc into different types, corresponding to their different features and different demands to the networks, and to be delivered to the customers on different charges. Consequently, certain QoS mechanisms must be implemented to provide/ensure the E2E QoS features of applications matching their trafc type. We distinguish two main categories of mechanisms: QoS provision mechanisms and QoS control mechanisms [2]: QoS provision mechanisms include parameters mapping, admission and resource reservations schemes. QoS control mechanisms consist of trafc shaping, scheduling, policing and control mechanisms. QoS can be offered by network operators with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). A SLA is a contract to specify the transit of services through network domains(more accurate denition and reference needed).

1.2.1 Applications point of view

In packet-switched networks, while discussing QoS, the applications are viewed in two different way with respect to network. One way in IP world (Proposed by IETF) are termed as real-time and non-real-time(elastic). Those applications deliver time-sensitive information are real-time, where the data blocks must be displayed consecutively at predetermined time intervals, thus require specic delay, jitter and error parameters. On the other hand, the applications dont include time-sensitive information are non-real-time, which may be much more tolerable to delay and jitter but more sensitive to error parameters. Another way was proposed by 3GPP in UMTS network, where applications are classied into four types based on the generated trafc: Conversational, Streaming, Interactive and background. 3

Before stepping into more detailed discussion on IP QoS viewpoint and UMTS QoS viewpoint, it is necessary to rst describe some well-known QoS metrics for presenting E2E service/application requirements, those are delay, jitter, loss rate and throughput.

Delay It is the elapsed time for a packet to traverse the network from the source to the destination. At the network layer, the end-to-end packet latency is the sum of processing delay, transmission delay, queuing delay and propagation delay. Jitter It is dened as the variation in delay encountered by similar packets following the same route through the network.The jitter requirement only affects real-time streaming applications because this QoS requirement arises from the continuous trafc characteristics of this class of applications. Jitter is generally included as a performance parameter since it is very important at the transport layer in packetized data systems, due to the inherent variability in arrival times of individual packets. Services intolerant of delay variation will usually try to reduce the delay variation by means of buffering. However, late data arrivals make data useless, resulting in receiver buffer underow, and early arrival can lead to receiver buffer overow. Loss Rate Loss rate refers to the percentage of data loss among all the delivered data in a given transmission time interval, which can be evaluated in frame level or packet level. Loss rate requirements apply to all classes of applications. In general, real-time applications might tolerate a limited amount of data lost, depending on the error resiliency of the decoder, and the type of application. On the other hand, non-real-time applications typically have much more strict requirement on data loss. Throughput It is dened as the rate at which packets are transmitted in a network. It can be expressed as a maximum rate or an average rate.

1.2.2 IP Point of view

The IP QoS point of view can be seen in a scenario, where the transport of IP packet through a set of network and one of them is UMTS network, as represented in Fig.1.1. The known approaches for dealing with IP QoS are Integrated Services (IntServ) and Differentiated Services (DiffServ). DiffServ is an attempt to design a simple architectural framework for QoS that can provide a variety of scalable end-to-end services across multiple separately 4

UE

IP Access Network (UMTS)

IP GGSN Networks

External Server

Figure 1.1: Reference Architecture administered domains without requiring complex behaviors in forwarding equipment [2]. This approach is interesting in sense that it overcomes many issues such as scalability, inter-operation and administration without using high signaling. Actually, unlike IntServ, DiffServ minimizes signaling by using Per-HopBehaviors (PHBs). Integrated Service provides application requirements to the network, which have to maintain QoS mechanisms to insure the promised QoS. The Resource reservation protocol(usually Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP)), transports the QoS requirements along the path from the sender to the receiver in order to make resource reservation. It sets states in router per ow and is supposed to gain a better E2E performance in case the networks on along the path is in congestion since there are enough transmission resource reserved for all the existing data ows.

1.2.3 UMTS Point of view

3GPP denes UMTS QoS classes as: 1. Conversational class; 2. streaming class; 3. interactive class; 4. background class. The main distinguishing factor between these QoS classes is how delay sensitive the trafc is: Conversational class is meant for trafc which is very delay sensitive while Background class is the most delay insensitive trafc class [3]. Table 1.1 shows the application associated with those types of trafc and their main characteristics: 5

Trafc Class

Examples of Applica- Fundamental characteristics tion Conversational(RT) Voice/Video Telephony Low E2E delay, low Jitter, two-way Streaming(RT) streaming video Low jitter, one-way Interactive(BE) Web Browsing Two-way, Low loss rate/error Background(BE) Email, Background One-way, Low loss rate/error download Table 1.1: UMTS QoS classes (RT: real-time, BE: best-effort) To provide these QoS requirements, 3GPP proposed the concept named Bearer Service. "To realise a certain network QoS a Bearer Service with clearly dened characteristics and functionality is to be set up from the source to the destination of a service. A bearer service includes all aspects to enable the provision of a contracted QoS. These aspects are among others the control signalling, user plane transport and QoS management functionality. A UMTS bearer service layered architecture is depicted in gure 1.2, each bearer service on a specic layer offers its individual services using services provided by the layers below." [3] The Bearer Service
TE MT RAN
CN EDGE NODE CN GATEWAY

TE

EndtoEnd Service
TE/MT Local Bearer Service External Bearer Service

UMTS Bearer Service

CN Bearer Service

Radio Acess Bearer Service

Radio Bearer Service RAN Acess Bearer Service

Backbone Bearer Service

Physical Radio Bearer Service

Physical Bearer Service

Figure 1.2: UMTS QoS Architecture (BS) concept is important in that it allowed us to divide the E2E QoS problem into 6

a set of sub-problems concerning the QoS provision inside a specic Bearer Service and the QoS prole mapping among them(between 2 BSs in the same plane or between an upper layer and a lower layer).

1.3 Problem Denition

When considering an End-2-End QoS provisioning via a UMTS network, there could be a long chain(e.g, from a MS user to a real-time application server located in Internet), as depicted in gure 1.3. In terms of BS concept, the E2E QoS or application level QoS is provided by two main domain: UMTS bearer service domain and IP bearer service domain. As mentioned in section 1.2, the rst problem in E2E QoS study is the mapping mechanism, which includes: 1. Application/service type mapping to UMTS BS QoS attributes; 2. UMTS QoS BS attributes mapping to IP BS QoS attributes, in terms of DiffServ or InterServ; 3. UMTS QoS BS attributes mapping to RAB Service attributes and to CN Service attributes; the further mapping to even lower BS attributes beyond the scope of our study. Within the application level mapping, there could be two cases in the UE side, since IP level BS manager is an optional function in UE [4]. If 1. the IP BS manager exist in UE The IP bearer services manager communicates with the UMTS bearer services manager through a translation function, and the interaction between UMTS bearer services and IP bearer services shall only occur at a translation function in the UE and GGSN. 2. there is no IP BS manager in UE The application QoS prole has to be translated directly into UMTS QoS prole and there is no IP level QoS between UE and GGSN. No matter in which case, IP QoS interaction still occur between GGSN and the application server in external IP network. And once the mapping is xed, (i.e, UMTS BS attributes are mapped into DiffServ), admission and resource reservations schemes will be decided according to DiffServ in IP domain. 7

UMTS BSs are provided between the UE and the GGSN, where UMTS QoS negotiation is provided by the PDP context, and the UMTS QoS prole is used to specify the QoS parameters in a PDP context. Hence PDP context is important and needed to be studied also. Secondly, QoS control mechanisms including trafc shaping, scheduling, policing and control mechanisms, have to be decided according to the mapping mechanism both on UMTS domain and IP domain.

Figure 1.3: Layered Service architecture of an E2E QoS chain in UMTS

1.4 Project Time Plan

1. Overview: Sept. 8th - Oct. 1st (a) Overview Paper study (b) More relevant study in order to rectify the existing problem. (c) Problem denition(preliminary) 2. Play-Scenario decision: Sept. 25th - Oct. 29th (a) Study on UMTS PDP context and QoS. 8

(b) Study on IP QoS. (c) Problem delimitation (d) Simulation study and installation. 3. Simulation: Oct 22th - Dec 23th (a) Make the rst end-2-end simulation model(Best Effort). (b) Propose a new strategy for End-2-End QoS provision 4. 9-Semester Presentation: Jan 25th, 2005 5. Simulation Analysis and Measurement: Jan 26th - Feb 28th (a) Simulation results Analysis with possible analytical model. (b) Design measurement setup for proposed E2E QoS strategy. (c) Measurement with emulator 6. Further output study: March 1st - April 1st Analysis (a) Measurement results analysis together with simulation result. (b) upgrade simulator based on output analysis if necessary. 7. Project report/Thesis nalize: April 1st - May 1th. (a) Build or polish analytic model based on simulation and measurement output. (b) Finish all report/Thesis documents. 8. Thesis Defence Preparation: May - June (a) Thesis hand in (b) Preparation for defence.

Bibliography
[1] Sudhir Dixit, Ramjee Prasad, "Wireless IP and Building the Mobile Internet",Artech House, 2002, ISBN 1-58053-354-X. [2] SAMU project, QOS Deliverable SP2-D1, http://samu.crm-paris.com/, 2001. [3] 3GPP TS 23.107, "QoS Concept and Architecture (Release 6)", 2002. [4] 3GPP TS 23.207, "End-to-End QoS Concept and Architecture" [5] Hans Peter Schwefel; Lecture notes: Wireless Networks II Aalborg University, 2004 [6] http://seacorn.ptinovacao.pt/

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