End-to-end service quality for latency-intensive internet protocol (IP) applications in a heterogeneous, multi-vendor environment

A method comprising:

• establishing a Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) session between a first network device and a second network device that are part of a geographically distributed enterprise voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) network;
• receiving, at the first network device from a first local terminal, a request to initiate a first VoIP call with a first remote terminal associated with the second network device;
• allocating a portion of pre-allocated resources associated with the RSVP session to the first VoIP call between the first local terminal and the first remote terminal;
• receiving, at the first network device from a second local terminal, a request to initiate a second VoIP call with a second remote terminal associated with the second network device;
• allocating a portion of the pre-allocated resources associated with the RSVP session to the second VoIP call between the second local terminal and the second remote terminal;
• and
• providing a desired level of Quality of Service (QoS) to both the first VoIP call and the second VoIP call by sharing the RSVP session between the first VoIP call and the second VoIP call by multiplexing packets containing voice or voice-band data associated with the first and second VoIP calls onto the RSVP session.

A media aggregation manager comprising:

• a resource manager to establish a reservation protocol session with one or more other media aggregation managers prior to establishment of any application sessions that share resources associated with the reservation protocol and to subsequently allocate and deallocate the resources in response to application session establishment requests and application session termination requests, respectively;
• an admission control manager coupled to the resource manager, the admission control manager to provide admission control for application flows based upon availability of the resources as indicated by the resource manager;
• a media multiplexor coupled to the admission control manager, the media multiplexor to tag media packets received from local application/endpoints that are associated with admitted application flows and to transmit the tagged media packets over the reservation protocol session;
• a media demultiplexor to forward media packets received from remote application/endpoints to the local application/endpoints based upon tags appended by a media multiplexor of the one or more other media aggregation managers;
• and
• a signaling gateway to perform signaling/media translation, if necessary, among a first signaling protocol employed by a first Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) environment in which the media aggregation manager is to operate and one or more signaling protocols employed by VoIP environments in which the one or more other media aggregation managers operate.