An increasing number of communication services are moving to an IP-based infrastructure. Packet telephony is probably the first important real-time service that must be supported well over an IP network. The use of IP presents a tremendous opportunity for service providers to exploit endpoint intelligence to offer creative new services going far beyond the current telephony service model. However, to support telephony, signaling protocols are needed that allow the service provider to offer network-layer service differentiation and, at the same time, to control access to both the enhanced network-layer quality of service as well as other services. This paper describes the distributed open signaling architecture (DOSA), which incorporates protocols that meet these needs. A key contribution of our work is a recognition of the need for coordination between call signaling, which controls access to telephony-specific services, and resource management, which controls access to network-layer resources.
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