Dynamic variation of class of service in a communication network based on network resources

• Main Authors: ZYSMAN, GEORGE ISAAC, STANZIONE, DANIEL CHARLES, MARINHO, JOHN ANTONIO, PITTAMPALLI, ESHWAR
• Format: Patent
• Language: English; French; German
• Published: 21.06.2000
• Edition: 7
• Subjects: ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION TECHNIQUE; ELECTRICITY; SELECTING; TELEPHONIC COMMUNICATION; TRANSMISSION; TRANSMISSION OF DIGITAL INFORMATION, e.g. TELEGRAPHICCOMMUNICATION; WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS

A communication system monitors the resources that are available for new users. When the availability of free resources becomes too small or falls below a threshold, the communication system initiates a reduction in the the class of service to selected users. The class of service can be reduced by reducing the quality of service provided to existing communications or by providing selected new users with only lower quality communications. The decision to alter the class of service is alerted to the end user and based on the profile of the end user, appropriate alteration of a specific resource parameter is undertaken. The quality of communications may be reduced, for example, by decreasing the information carrying capacity of the channel available to a particular user and thereby decreasing the data transfer rate, decreasing the amount of error encoding used to detect and correct errors introduced by a communication channel, or in the case of a wireless system, using a lower rate vocoder (voice encoder) which will reduce the voice quality or clarity of the speech transmitted over the communication channel.