UMTS architecture extension to adapt multimedia services and manage their flow properties

Our approach exposed in this paper consists of providing an end‐to‐end adaptation frame to UMTS REL.99 (UMTS Release 1999, first phase of UMTS) commercial services, according to a virtual home environment (VHE) context. A commercial service provided to the user should be adapted during its selection as well as during its transfer through the different parts of the network. These adaptations are due to the fluctuation of the parameters of the network and the need to adapt the quality of service (QoS) parameters. The four steps of adaptation we will develop in our model will be guaranteed by ‘adaptation bearer service (ABS)’. An ABS will provide, for example, data encoding or data compression. ABS differs according to the localization and the adaptation mode. In this paper, we present also our adaptation strategy and associated policies. The purpose of this strategy is to classify and then select service flows which are to be adapted in priority. Policies are specified according to factors that we defined. Fuzzy logic is used for the implementation of this strategy as it represents a natural reasoning mode useful to decide which commercial service adaptation policy is to be carried out according to resource use context. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.