A semantic approach for QoS specification of communication services using QoE parameters

Abstract

Various operations related to Quality of Service (QoS) management in communication networks require the clients/users to specify the quality level of the network service. The current QoS proposals adopt a fixed set of performance parameters at the network level to specify quality levels, avoiding dealing with the problem of heterogeneity among QoS parameters and metrics during the service management. However, in several situations where humans are the end-users of the service, the quality level should be specified using Quality of Experience (QoE) parameters, more natural for humans than network performance parameters. On the other hand, the QoS specification using QoE parameters is not sufficient to the service providers; they must translate QoE parameters into network parameters. This paper proposes a semantic approach to the automatic QoE/QoS mapping using the Network QoS Ontology (NetQoSOnt), offering automatic and extensible translation between QoE and QoS parameters. The use of our proposal is illustrated by supporting a voice over IP service negotiation. © 2012 The Brazilian Computer Society.