Adaptive Quality of Service Management for Next Generation Residential Gateways

The TISPAN workgroup inside ETSI is currently working on accommodating the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) architecture, which has been created for the mobile world, to the fixed scenario where there is a new important element to be taken into account: the Residential Gateway (RGW). This element is typically considered as a customer device where providers do not usually have anything to configure. However, in order to achieve real end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) this cannot be true anymore. This paper focuses on the way that a RGW is capable of configuring itself (an interface with the providers is also available), regarding Quality of Service parameters, into a Next Generation Network (NGN) scenario. The proposed RGW architecture is also flexible enough so as to adapt the QoS management mechanism to different possible scenarios, e.g. configured by the provider, by the customer or even autoconfigured by the RGW itself. A specific scenario, where a RGW is deployed in the TISPAN NGN architecture, will be explained and validated to proof the concept of the RGW architecture.