White Paper Measurement and Analysis of End-to-end Service Quality of 3G Networks and Services

The QoS (quality of service) of a service product perceived by the end-user depends on the performance achieved by the components that constitute that product as well as performance of the network and service resources on which those components run. These resources may be spread over many domains and owned by different network and service providers. In this scenario, the end-toend QoS will depend on overall performance achieved by all the network and service components. Measuring performance and analysing it to ascertain service product QoS is a challenging task and the subject of this paper. Much research work to date has overlooked the end-to-end service quality issue while concentrating on the measurement and analysis of the performance of IP-based networks. The work that does address service quality issues does not relate to the work of standards bodies such as 3GPP (3 Generation Partnership Project) and TMForum, IETF, and ITU-T, which are developing a common framework for 3G service quality measurements. This White Paper tackles this challenge by investigating a mapping between QoS perceived by end-user onto performance of individual networks and services in different domains, and relating this work to the work of standards bodies. The key problem is defined and the mechanism to measure network and service performance and transform it into end-to-end service quality is developed. This paper also covers how the measurement mechanism can be applied to SLA violation monitoring.