QoS assessment and measurement for end-to-end services

Abstract

The essential aspect of the global evaluation of a service is the opinion of the users of the service. The result of this evaluation expresses the users‘ degrees of satisfaction. A typical user is not concerned with how a particular service is provided, or with any of the aspects of the network’s internal design. However, he is interested in comparing one service with another in terms of certain universal, useroriented performance concerns, which apply to any end-to-end service. Comparable application-oriented evaluation methods and results are needed urgently. This paper outlines a generic quality evaluation methodology for multimedia applications like e-mail-based services, the World Wide Web (WWW), and real time applications. It complements today’s quality frameworks outlined by international standardization bodies like ISO or ITU-T. The method introduced is applied to a videoconferencing service to describe its principles and benefits. The paper is for end users and (competing) service providers trying to get comparable evaluation results by applying common and simple measurement methods and by concentrating on a well-defined subset of quality characteristics.