QoS Support for Mobile Users Using NSIS Roland Bless and Martin R¨ohricht ⋆ Institute of Telematics Universit¨at Karlsruhe (TH) Zirkel 2, D–76128 Karlsruhe, Germany {bless,roehricht}@tm.uka.de Abstract. Resource reservations in the Internet become more and more important with the advent of real-time multimedia services like Voice- over-IP and IPTV. At the same time we see an increasing interest in accessing Internet services by using mobile devices. In this paper we describe how Quality-of-Service guarantees can be achieved in mobile environments across different domains using the Next Steps in Signal- ing (NSIS) framework. We provide an analysis of mobility scenarios in combination with QoS signaling and propose to use an additional node local Flow Information Service element that supplies the necessary mo- bility support within NSIS capable mobility-aware nodes. We show that reservations can be setup quickly along the new path after a handover happened. Even the tear down of the reservation of the old path after a successful handover is performed quickly. Keywords: QoS, NSIS, Signaling, MobileIP. 1 Introduction Controlling resources in the Internet requires manipulation of state in network elements along the path of a given data flow. In order to install, maintain, or tear down state on nodes on a given path signaling must be performed accordingly. The Resource reSerVation Protocol (RSVP) was once designed as a signaling protocol for Quality-of-Service establishment in IP networks. In response to some deficiencies of RSVP the IETF working group Next Steps in Signaling (NSIS) [1] was formed to design a framework for generic signaling on the IP layer. With the advent of bandwidth demanding Internet applications and multi- media streams such as video broadcasts, voice-over-IP, or IPTV a continuously growing need for Quality-of-Service (QoS) arises. NSIS elaborated a QoS signal- ing protocol as its first use case which enables applications to reserve resources along a given path. As mobile devices are becoming increasingly powerful, mobility and mobile computing become more and more attractive. That rises the desire to have con- tinuous network connectivity. Since the Internet Protocol was not designed to ⋆ The authors would like to thank Max Laier for his implementation efforts and con- ceptual input. Part of this work was supported by Deutsche Telekom Laboratories and T-Systems within the ScaleNet project. L. Fratta et al. (Eds.): NETWORKING 2009, LNCS 5550, pp. 169–181, 2009. c  IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009