Management and admission control based on policies and measurements for the packet-switched domain of the UMTS core network

In order to serve the needs of the emerging services and applications, the UMTS authority of standardization (3GPP) introduces at its fifth release of standardization the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS). Also, for the enhanced services (IMS), a policy management approach is exerted which integrates a policy-based admission control. Nevertheless, as currently defined in 3GPP, the aspects of ‘‘policy’’ and ‘‘resources’ availability’’ are prone to improvements. This paper presents a diagram of operation and an admission control mechanism for the packet-switched domain of the UMTS core network. Both rely upon policies and measurements and serve the needs of QoS. In order to attest the quality of our solution, we carried out a series of simulations on OPNET. The results illustrate the compromise offered by our solution in terms of QoS and utilization and show the importance of the conditioning mechanisms. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.