A Framework to Analyze Network Performance Based on Information Quality

Information theory has made great impact on research and development of communication systems. However, research in networking, a system built on communication components, has not benefited much from information theory and a theoretical framework to guide the analysis and design of networks is still lacking. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an information-theoretical framework to explore the quantitative relationship between information and network performance. Another attribute of information, namely information quality (IQ), is proposed to reflect the degree of importance of information to the target performance metric. IQ can be utilized to identify important information, so that network resource can first be allocated to such information, and hence to improve the network performance. Moreover, information efficiency (IE) is proposed as a metric to measure the information efficiency of network protocols and it can be used to analyze and compare the performance of different network protocols. Opportunistic scheduling is used to illustrate our proposed framework.