MODEL FOR ENFORCING DIFFERENT PHASES OF THE END-TO-END NEGOTIATION PROTOCOL (E2ENP) AIMING QOS SUPPORT FOR MULTI-STREAM AND MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS

The underlying invention generally relates to the field of mobile computing in a networking environment with distributed multimedia applications and technologies. More specifically, it is directed to the concept of the End-to-End Negotiation Protocol (E2ENP) phases, which enable a pre-negotiation (802, 804, 805), fast negotiation (806) and a fast, dynamic renegotiation (808) of the end-to-end quality and capabilities for telecommunication sessions (102), for multiple configurations of two or a multiplicity of end peers and/or intermediate components in a consistent, reliable, and incremental way by enabling the mobile users' applications to efficiently and timely react to QoS violations. In this context, the invention proposes a model for defining user profiles and terminal capability information in such a way that hierarchical QoS contract specifications (1108), e.g. compelling correlations (804) across different sets of QoS contracts (1108) for related media streams (206), can be enforced and used for deriving negotiable information. As a reference implementation of this concept, this invention proposes a novel usage of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP, 910) standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in conjunction with extensions of the Session Description Protocol Next Generation (SDPng, 912) specification based on the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in order to implement concepts of the End-to-End QoS Negotiation Protocol (E2ENP, 908).