Method in a communication system, a communication system and a communication device

Abstract

The present invention relates to a method in a communication system, a communication system and a communication device. In the method, media streams are transmitted from a sending communication device to a receiving communication device at least partly via a wireless communication network. At least one media stream is selected to be transmitted to the receiving communication device, QoS requirements for transmitting the selected at least one media stream are defined, transmission resources are reserved from the wireless communication network for the transmission of the at least one media stream, and a setup procedure is performed between the receiving communication device and the sending communication device for activating the one packet data transmission connection.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application claims priority under 35 USC §119 to U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60 / 550, 443 filed on Mar. 4, 2004 and also claims domestic priority under 35 USC §120 to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10 / 876,262 filed Jun. 24, 2004.FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] The technology area is that of streaming media over mobile networks, where a multimedia server, a mobile network and a streaming client are logically connected e.g. via an RTSP protocol (Real Time Streaming Protocol) used for session setup and control, and e.g. an RTP protocol (Real Time transport Protocol) for media transfer. Streaming systems can be rate adaptive or not. This invention is related to rate adaptive streaming systems that can adapt the content and / or transmission rate to the varying network channel conditions. [0003] The present invention relates to a method in a communication system, in which multimedia streams are transmitted from a sending commun...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0054] Another aim of the current invention is to adjust the delivery of the streaming data and / or signalling to provide optimal quality of service.

[0058] The present invention has advantages when compared to systems and methods of prior art. The invention allows to make a streaming server aware of the QoS parameters granted for each PDP context. This allows a better and more accurate adaptation by specifying a more precise QoS profile parameters.

[0059] The invention allows also to make a streaming server aware of the network type used by wireless communication device, which further improves the quality of the service. Thanks to the invention the server may also properly construct 3GPP / 3GPP2 compliant signalling.

[0062] The invention makes use of the wireless streaming concepts and improves the multimedia streaming performance and adaptation for wireless domain, making use of the 3GPP and 3GPP2 specific protocols and codecs.

[0063] Another important advantage is given by the possibility to efficiently use the delta bandwidth computed as maximum bit rate—guaranteed bit rate. This bandwidth can be used for bandwidth adaptation or for handling peaks of video bit rate. Finally, this delta bandwidth can be used for delivering the best media quality when encoding multimedia streams in real-time, for example, by changing encoding parameters (including the media stream bit rate) on the fly that have impact on the bit rate.

Problems solved by technology

For example, in e-mail connections, a relatively long delay can be allowed in the transmission of streams.

However, in such classes, the accuracy of the data transfer is not such an important property.

Otherwise the presentation may not be presented with the same accuracy and error free in the receiving wireless communication device.

Such selection bases may not be appropriate or accurate enough wherein situations may occur in which the bearer service can not provide enough transmission capacity for the connection, or it provides more capacity than is needed, wherein the usage of the network resources is not efficient.

However, when using prior art methods it is not always possible to inform both ends of the connection about the demands for the connection.

Basic streaming systems are non-adaptive.

If the streaming client decides to signal to the streaming server e.g. via RTSP some of the QoS profile parameters, for example the guaranteed bit rate, the maximum bit rate or the transfer delay, some problems may occur to the server in the correct interpretation of the QoS profile and, in the end, in the nature of the network connection.

Therefore, it cannot be anything else than 70 kbps in this example, because there would be no way to split the maximum bit rate between the two media.

However, every value greater than maximum bit rate provided by the network (70 kbps in this example) is not allowed, because the network resources are not available.

This drives to bad user QoS.

A similar problem occurs if the guaranteed bit rate information sent to the server is what is really granted by the network in the PDP context.

For instance, if the information of the granted 64 kbps guaranteed bit rate is sent to the server in both SETUPs messages, even more problems would be generated because the server will be entitled to send at a guaranteed bit rate of even 64 kbps of audio and 64 kbps of video, making a total guaranteed bit rate of 128 kbps, which is not available in the PDP QoS in this example.

This would produce network buffer overflow and bad user QoS.

Unfortunately such information is only available on the client side.

If the multimedia streaming server does not know what type of network the client is using, then during the signalling the server might have problem responding to the request.

In the above described examples cases the main problem is that the streaming server does not know what is the type of the network channel reserved for data transfer (that can be either single or multiple PDP context), because it has no visibility on the PDP context allocation type.

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