Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Within the Canadian telecommunications industry, we are witnessing the convergence of cellular service providers and Internet service providers aiming to provide an "always best connected" (ABC) service to deliver multimedia communications and contents to diverse subscribers using a variety of heterogeneous broadband wireline and wireless networks, the latter including 3G cellular, WiFi WLANs, WiMax, etc., referred as broadband wireless networks (BWNs) in this proposal. A common characteristic of these diverse networks is the use of the universal Internet Protocol (IP) to facilitate network interconnection, and industry is deploying IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) technology to provide interworking between these heterogeneous access network technologies and extend multimedia services over BWNs. Technologies do not currently exist to manage subscriber access to these diverse networks in a unified manner. An important requirement of multimedia applications is that the transport network needs to provide an appropriate level of quality of service (QoS) support to ensure acceptable reception quality. Therefore another challenge is to enhance BWN technologies for QoS support, and to enhance multimedia encoding/decoding to counteract the anticipated limit in QoS offered by some BWNs. The overall goal of this project is to develop technologies that enable delivery of ABC multimedia services to subscribers via heterogeneous BWNs interworked through an IMS. Specific objectives include the following: (1) Development of an access management framework to globally manage the identity and service profile of individual subscribers and facilitate efficient access to multiple BWNs for ABC service; (2) Development of scalable and error resilient multiple descriptive coding/decoding techniques for H.264 multimedia and joint optimization with advanced transport layer protocol; (3) Development of QoS support techniques for efficient real-time multimedia access over WiFi and WiMax networks and over heterogeneous BWNs interworked with a core-IP network through an IMS.  Our efforts will provide cutting edge technologies and train highly qualified personnel to satisfy the future needs of Canadian telecommunications industry.