The underlying invention generally relates to the field of mobile
computing in a networking environment with distributed multimedia
applications and technologies. More specifically, it is directed to the
concept of the End-to-End Negotiation Protocol (E2ENP) phases, which
enable a pre-negotiation (802, 804, 805), fast negotiation (806) and a
fast, dynamic renegotiation (808) of the end-to-end quality and
capabilities for telecommunication sessions (102), for multiple
configurations of two or a multiplicity of end peers and/or intermediate
components in a consistent, reliable, and incremental way by enabling the
mobile users' applications to efficiently and timely react to QoS
violations. In this context, the invention proposes a model for defining
user profiles and terminal capability information in such a way that
hierarchical QoS contract specifications (1108), e.g. compelling
correlations (804) across different sets of QoS contracts (1108) for
related media streams (206), can be enforced and used for deriving
negotiable information. As a reference implementation of this concept,
this invention proposes a novel usage of the Session Initiation Protocol
(SIP, 910) standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in
conjunction with extensions of the Session Description Protocol Next
Generation (SDPng, 912) specification based on the Extensible Markup
Language (XML) in order to implement concepts of the End-to-End QoS
Negotiation Protocol (E2ENP, 908).