A New Architecture for Measuring and Assessing Streaming Media Quality

Conducting quality assessment for streaming media services, particularly from the end user perspective, has not been widely addressed by the network research community and remains a hard problem. In this paper we discuss the general problem of assessing the quality of streaming media in a large-scale IP network. This work presents two main contributions. First, we specify a new measurement and assessment architecture that can flexibly support the needs of different classes of assessment consumers while supporting both new and existing measurements that can be correlated with user perceptions of media stream quality. Second, we demonstrate that a prototype implementation of this architecture can be used to assess a user’s perceived quality of a media stream, by judicious choice and assessment of objective metrics. We conclude by discussing how this architecture can be used to predict future periods of stream quality degradation.