QoS metric for packet networks
Gonçalo Quadros, Edmundo Monteiro, Fernando Boavida · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1998
Several approaches have been proposed to empower communication systems with quality of service (QoS) capabilities. In general, their main goal is to coherently support the end-to-end performance needs of applications, based on the establishment of, and agreement on, a set of concepts, policies and mechanisms. Regardless of the used approach, an important challenge associated with quality of service provision is the development of an efficient and flexible way to monitor QoS. The existence of an effective metric to quantify the QoS offered to classes or flows of data, and to assess the performance of communication systems, would facilitate the implementation of a QoS monitor. Such a QoS metric should be able to produce comparable measures, independently of the nature and scope of the objects to quantify, that is, should turn possible uniform QoS measures. Nevertheless, the main difficulty related to the development of such metric streams exactly from the disparate nature and scope of the things to measure. This paper discusses the above mentioned difficulties nd proposes a QoS metric intended to support QoS measurements on integrated QoS management system, which is fundamental to construct QoS-capable communication systems able to efficiently deal with the increasing variety of applications. This paper also present the main challenges found during the first approach to the QoS metric implementation. The intention was to test the metric basic concepts, to assess its feasibility, and to measure its associated overhead. The result of these overhead test are also presented.