Multipoint QoS Measurement

The continuously increasing interest on different kind of multimedia applications, sets new challenges to the communications. In particular, IPTV, on-demand video, and video conferencing require high bandwidths, and thus, easily cause congestions. On the other hand, even though e.g., a single VoIP connection does not require high bandwidth, the number of VoIP users is exploding. The difference to traditional data transmission applications is that these real-time applications require Quality of Service (QoS) from the network, for instance, an IPTV user expects the same steadiness of the service as with the broadcast TV. To assist in reaching better quality in heterogeneous networking environment, the operators need better measurement and monitoring systems. VTT’s QoSMeT tool allows real-time passive monitoring of single application streams, which give direct insight on how the applications see the network performance. In this work, the end-to-end measurement scheme has been extended to allow multiple measurement points within the network path. Thus, the developed measurement system allows real-time passive monitoring of individual applications over multiple measurement points, enabling the splitting the end-to-end performance to network segment performances. This allow e.g., an operator to locate the performance bottleneck in the network. Typical measurement methods tell the overall performance of the network, but in heterogeneous networking environment, it does not necessary reflect well on how the individual applications behave.