Quantifying the quality of service of streaming media in differentiated services networks

Quality of service (QoS) support in the current Internet is indispensable because of QoS-sensitive real-time applications such as voice-over-IP, IP-TV, video conferencing, online gaining etc. Since the introduction of the differentiated services (Diff-Serv) architecture there has been considerable work reported in literature on its performance evaluation. However, none of them have addressed the basic issue of quantification of QoS for supporting streaming media. The main contribution in this paper is the quantification of the QoS of streaming media in terms of mean opinion score (MOS) values. A test bed has been implemented using off-the-shelf components. The experimental results and MOS values are used to show that in a DiffServ assured forwarding network architecture, with class based weighted fair queue scheduling discipline, the QoS of streaming media is not compromised when the load exceeds the reserved capacity, even in case of congestion.