Quality of Service

Network Services are considered end-to-end, this means from a Terminal Equipment (TE) to another TE. An End-to-End Service may have a certain Quality of Service (QoS) which is provided for the user of a network service. It is the user that decides whether he is satisfied with the provided QoS or not.

To realise a certain network QoS a Bearer Service with clearly defined 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 below, each bearer service on a specific layer offers it's individual services using services provided by the layers below.

There are four different QoS classes:

conversational class streaming class interactive class background class

Quality of Service Network Services are considered end-to-end, this means from a Terminal Equipment (TE) to another TE. An End-to-End Service may have a certain Quality of Service (QoS) which is provided for the user of a network service. It is the user that decides whether he is satisfied with the provided QoS or not. To realise a certain network QoS a Bearer Service with clearly defined 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 below, each bearer service on a specific layer offers it's individual services using services provided by the layers below. QoS Architecture There are four different QoS classes: conversational class streaming class interactive class background class Traffic class Conversational class Real Time Streaming class Real Time Interactive class Best Effort Background class Best Effort Fundamental characteristics - Preserve time relation (variation) between information entities of the stream - Conversational pattern (stringent and low delay ) - Preserve time relation (variation) between information entities of the stream - Request response pattern -Preserve payload content -Destination is not expecting the data within a certain time -Preserve payload content Example of the application   voice   streaming video   web browsing   telemetry, emails UMTS QoS classes List of UMTS Bearer Service Attributes: Traffic class ('conversational', 'streaming', 'interactive', 'background') Maximum bit rate (kbps) Guaranteed bit rate (kbps) Delivery order (y/n) Maximum SDU size (octets) SDU format information (bits) SDU error ratio Residual bit error ratio Delivery of erroneous SDUs (y/n/-) Transfer delay (ms) Traffic handling priority Allocation/Retention Priority Source statistics descriptor ('speech'/'unknown')