The Throughput Utility Function:
Assessing Network Impact on Mobile
Services
Markus Fiedler, Kurt Tutschku, Stefan Chevul,
Lennart Isaksson1 and Andreas Binzenhöfer
Research Report 374
Abstract
Based on the need for distributed end-to-end quality management for next-generation
mobile Internet services, this paper presents a ready-to-deploy quality assessment
concept for the impact of the network on the performance of mobile services. We
consider the Throughput Utility Function (TUF) as a special case of the Network
Utility Function (NUF). These functions combine the observed network utility at
the inlet and the outlet of a mobile network. NUF and TUF capture the damping
effect of the network onto user-perceived quality from an end-to-end 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 100 %. We
demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed TUF by measurements of applicationperceived
throughput conducted in mobile networks.