The Throughput Utility Function: Assessing Network Impact on Mobile Services

Based on the need for distributed end-to-end quality management for next-generation mobile Internet services, this paper presents a ready-to-deploy quality assessment concept for the impact of the network on the performance of mobile services. We consider the Throughput Utility Function (TUF) as a special case of the Network Utility Function (NUF). These functions combine the observed network utility at the inlet and the outlet of a mobile network. NUF and TUF capture the damping effect of the network onto user-perceived quality from an end-to-end perspective. As opposed to incomprehensible QoS parameters such as delay and loss, the NUF is highly intuitive due to its mapping to a simple value between 0 and 100 %. We demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed TUF by measurements of applicationperceived throughput conducted in mobile networks.