Network Performance Assessment with Quality of Experience Benchmarks

Today the performance of network services and devices is mainly assessed using Quality of Services (QoS) factors. These provide statistics about the quality of the network behavior but cannot accurately reflect how the unpredictable impairments which might occur in the network end up affecting the perception of the final beneficiary of these services, i.e. the user. This situation arises because QoS-based performance analysis does not capture the combined end-to-end properties of networks and applications. In this paper, we introduce a new network performance methodology based on Quality of Experience benchmarks, whereby we estimate the quality of the service as it is perceived by the user. We illustrate this approach in the context of video streaming services, showing how to evaluate quality degradation in Software Defined Networks. Our approach is better suited to the evaluation of dynamic networks and helps better pinpointing the critical factors that affect the applications the most.