<title>Application-level performance of multimedia services</title>

Abstract

Quality of Service (QoS) is a difficult term to define for multimedia applications. The main reason is that both audio and video quality are subjective and difficult to quantify. Much work has been done in the past to map the subjective quality of video and audio into measurable quantities. Unfortunately, when it comes to IP environments, not much experience and mathematical work exists that can be used to define robust metrics for measurement of QoS. In this paper, we report on measurements of multimedia QoS and try to map subjective criteria to discrete measurables in terms of packet loss rates, packet delays, and other quantities. We report the results of measurements done at the application level and show how network characteristics affect the perceived quality of multimedia applications. In particular, we analyze the application traffic generated by MBone clients in a distributed network education scenario.