Grading and predicting networked application behaviour

The user-perceived quality of an application operating over a communication network has a considerable influence on the usefulness of that application. Intuitively, it may be assumed that this quality will be related to the current network performance, but in practice the relationship is often complex and difficult to determine. A scheme has been developed whereby the performance of network applications can be assessed and empirically graded for various controlled network loading conditions. Given the current network loading conditions on an operational network and information generated by the grading process, it is possible to predict the performance of the network application before the application is actually run. This has the potential for reducing the amount of traffic forced on a network as a consequence of aborted connections.