A Self-Organizing Concept for Distributed End-to-End Quality Monitoring

Stefan Chevul, Andreas Binzenhöfer, Matthias Schmid, Kurt Tutschku and Markus Fiedler
Research Report 378

Abstract

The subjective service quality as perceived by the end-user is an aspect which is often neglected in classic network monitoring. Yet it is the end-user who decides whether he will continue to use the service or not. This is especially true for real time services like Voice over IP telephony (VoIP), whose experienced quality heavily depends on the current network situation. In this paper we present a self-organizing concept for distributed monitoring of the end-to-end quality, which will bridge the feedback gap between the user and the provider. It is based on a simple and robust measurement mechanism, which is running at the host of the end-user. As a proof-of-concept we implemented a prototype of our architecture and show the practicability of our concept using VoIP quality measurements.