1,286 research outputs found
Quality assessment and usage behavior of a mobile voice-over-IP service
Voice-over-IP (VoIP) services offer users a cheap alternative to the traditional mobile operators to make voice calls. Due to the increased capabilities and connectivity of mobile devices, these VoIP services are becoming increasingly popular on the mobile platform. Understanding the user's usage behavior and quality assessment of the VoIP service plays a key role in optimizing the Quality of Experience (QoE) and making the service to succeed or to fail. By analyzing the usage and quality assessments of a commercial VoIP service, this paper identifies device characteristics, context parameters, and user aspects that influence the usage behavior and experience during VoIP calls. Whereas multimedia services are traditionally evaluated by monitoring usage and quality for a limited number of test subjects and during a limited evaluation period, this study analyzes the service usage and quality assessments of more than thousand users over a period of 120 days. This allows to analyze evolutions in the usage behavior and perceived quality over time, which has not been done up to now for a widely-used, mobile, multimedia service. The results show a significant evolution over time of the number of calls, the call duration, and the quality assessment. The time of the call, the used network, and handovers during the call showed to have a significant influence on the users' quality assessments
SecMon: End-to-End Quality and Security Monitoring System
The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming a more available and
popular way of communicating for Internet users. This also applies to
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and merging these two have already proven to be
successful (e.g. Skype). Even the existing standards of VoIP provide an
assurance of security and Quality of Service (QoS), however, these features are
usually optional and supported by limited number of implementations. As a
result, the lack of mandatory and widely applicable QoS and security guaranties
makes the contemporary VoIP systems vulnerable to attacks and network
disturbances. In this paper we are facing these issues and propose the SecMon
system, which simultaneously provides a lightweight security mechanism and
improves quality parameters of the call. SecMon is intended specially for VoIP
service over P2P networks and its main advantage is that it provides
authentication, data integrity services, adaptive QoS and (D)DoS attack
detection. Moreover, the SecMon approach represents a low-bandwidth consumption
solution that is transparent to the users and possesses a self-organizing
capability. The above-mentioned features are accomplished mainly by utilizing
two information hiding techniques: digital audio watermarking and network
steganography. These techniques are used to create covert channels that serve
as transport channels for lightweight QoS measurement's results. Furthermore,
these metrics are aggregated in a reputation system that enables best route
path selection in the P2P network. The reputation system helps also to mitigate
(D)DoS attacks, maximize performance and increase transmission efficiency in
the network.Comment: Paper was presented at 7th international conference IBIZA 2008: On
Computer Science - Research And Applications, Poland, Kazimierz Dolny
31.01-2.02 2008; 14 pages, 5 figure
A Utility-based QoS Model for Emerging Multimedia Applications
Existing network QoS models do not sufficiently reflect the challenges faced by high-throughput, always-on, inelastic multimedia applications. In this paper, a utility-based QoS model is proposed as a user layer extension to existing communication QoS models to better assess the requirements of multimedia applications and manage the QoS provisioning of multimedia flows. Network impairment utility functions are derived from user experiments and combined to application utility functions to evaluate the application quality. Simulation is used to demonstrate the validity of the proposed QoS model
Automatic best wireless network selection based on key performance indicators
Introducing cognitive mechanisms at the application layer may lead to the possibility of an automatic selection of the wireless network that can guarantee best perceived experience by the final user. This chapter investigates this approach based on the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE), by introducing the use of application layer parameters, namely Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are defined for different traffic types based on experimental data. A model for an ap- plication layer cognitive engine is presented, whose goal is to identify and select, based on KPIs, the best wireless network among available ones. An experimenta- tion for the VoIP case, that foresees the use of the One-way end-to-end delay (OED) and the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as KPIs is presented. This first implementation of the cognitive engine selects the network that, in that specific instant, offers the best QoE based on real captured data. To our knowledge, this is the first example of a cognitive engine that achieves best QoE in a context of heterogeneous wireless networks
QoE Modelling, Measurement and Prediction: A Review
In mobile computing systems, users can access network services anywhere and
anytime using mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones. These devices
connect to the Internet via network or telecommunications operators. Users
usually have some expectations about the services provided to them by different
operators. Users' expectations along with additional factors such as cognitive
and behavioural states, cost, and network quality of service (QoS) may
determine their quality of experience (QoE). If users are not satisfied with
their QoE, they may switch to different providers or may stop using a
particular application or service. Thus, QoE measurement and prediction
techniques may benefit users in availing personalized services from service
providers. On the other hand, it can help service providers to achieve lower
user-operator switchover. This paper presents a review of the state-the-art
research in the area of QoE modelling, measurement and prediction. In
particular, we investigate and discuss the strengths and shortcomings of
existing techniques. Finally, we present future research directions for
developing novel QoE measurement and prediction technique
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