Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM 2001), pp. 83-95, August 27-31, 2001, San Diego, CA
On the Impact of Policing and Rate Guarantees in Diff-Serv Networks: A Video Streaming Application Perspective
Cite This Publication
Wael Ashmawi, Roch Guerin, Stephen Wolf, and Margaret H. Pinson, “On the Impact of Policing and Rate Guarantees in Diff-Serv Networks: A Video Streaming Application Perspective,” in Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM 2001) pp. 83-95, August 27-31, 2001, San Diego, CA.
Wael Ashmawi, Roch Guerin, Stephen Wolf, and Margaret H. Pinson 
Abstract: Over the past few years, there have been a number of proposals aimed at introducing different levels of service in the Internet. One of the more recent proposals is the Differentiated Services (Diff-Serv) architecture, and in this paper we explore how the policing actions and associated rate guarantees provided by the Expedited Forwarding (EF) translate into perceived benefits for applications that are the presumed users of such enhancements. Specifically, we focus on video streaming applications that arguably have relatively strong service quality requirements, and which should, therefore, stand to benefit from the availability of some form of enhanced service. Our goal is to gain a better understanding of the relation that exists between application level quality measures and the selection of the network level parameters that govern the delivery of the guarantees that an EF based service would provide. Our investigation, which is experimental in nature, relies on a number of standard streaming video servers and clients that have been modified and instrumented to allow quantification of the perceived quality of the received video stream. Quality assessments are performed using a Video Quality Measurement tool based on the ANSI objective quality standard. Measurements were made over both a local Diff-Serv testbed and across the QBone, a QoS enabled segment of the Internet2 infrastructure. The paper reports and analyzes the results of those measurements.
Keywords: quality of service; objective; subjective; correlation; streaming video quality metrics; Internet2; differentiated services; expedited forwarding
For technical information concerning this report, contact:
Margaret H. Pinson
Institute for Telecommunication Sciences
(303) 497-3579
mpinson@ntia.doc.gov
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