Due to increased user/service requirements in terms of network quality of service (QoS) parameters, and heterogeneity of end-user access network options and terminal capabilities, introducing “network-awareness” into rich multimedia and multimodal networked applications could provide a critical advantage. An idea behind network-awareness is to let the applications indicate their requirements and to adapt to changing conditions in the network, as well as to let the network “know” of the applications' resource demands. This approach is based on signaling, as a means to request special treatment for traffic in the network and to receive indications from the network of different conditions. Another important issue for the proposed solution is the simplicity of use. Providing developers with a reusable solution that, to much extent, removes the need for understanding a specific signaling protocol eases and quickens development of the network-aware applications. The project objective was to identify generic signaling functionality, and to create an application programming interface (API) which will enable application developers to create advanced multimodal networked services. The developed API was applied in a case study using a prototype application.
Index Terms: Application Programming Interface, Dynamic service adaptation, End-to-end Quality of Service signaling, Multimedia and multimodal networked applications, IP Multimedia Subsystem