Managing multi-connectivity for IP services

This paper introduces the concept and architecture for access network multi-connectivity (ANMC), an asset that can help to align service provider, application provider, and subscriber imperatives. ANMC can expose available access network and user device-specific information to applications, and thus allow wireless service providers to better manage their network, ensuring that the access option chosen for an application is matched to the needs of the application, given the constraints of the available access connections. Applications benefit from ANMC because with access network knowledge, they may improve the user experience by explicitly adapting their services according to access network constraints or intelligently stage the delivery of services to periods with favorable access connectivity. Since service delivery in the access network can be tailored individually to applications, new business relationships between access network providers and application providers are made possible with inter-system mobility and associated policy control exposed as an application enablement service. The mechanism ANMC uses to support this is intelligent presence, which builds upon techniques defined in 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and IEEE 802.21 to support inter-system mobility. Intelligent presence extends the concept of presence from simple reachability, often via a transparent Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) protocol, to richer presence statement dependent on meeting application, service provider policy, network congestion, subscriber subscription, user activity and device state criteria for bearer access.