The Network Utility Function: A Practicable Concept for Assessing Network Impact on Distributed Services
M. Fiedler, S. Chevul and O. Radtke, K. Tutschku, and A. Binzenhöfer
Research Report 356
Abstract
Based on the need for distributed end-to-end quality management for nextgeneration
Internet services, this paper presents a ready-to-deploy quality assessment concept for
the impact of the network on the service performance. The proposed Network Utility
Function (NUF) combines the observed network utility at the inlet and the outlet. Thus,
it captures the damping effect of the network onto user-perceived quality from an end-toend
perspective. As opposed to incomprehensible QoS parameters such as delay and loss,
the NUF is highly intuitive due to its mapping to a simple value between 0 and 1. We
demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed concept for a special NUF, the Throughput
Utility Function (TUF) by realistic simulation.