Service performance monitoring for EGPRS networks based on treatment classes

GPRS/EDGE networks provide an opportunity for operators to offer new services to their potential and existing subscribers. Unlike circuit switched services, EGPRS services are dependent on a multitude of factors to guarantee a timely content delivery. To ensure that the contracted QoS is sustained, it is not sufficient to overprovision resources, fn addition, operators need to have tools for monitoring the QoS experienced by diverse packet flows in different network segments. This paper presents theoretically, and confirms experimentally, a simple mechanism to monitor throughput of distinct services across EGPRS networks, which enables a proactive and timely supervision of service level agreements and quality. The approach is based on the treatment class concept, which maps services with different performance requirements onto distinct QoS profiles. By means of treatment classes, defined by a subset of the bearer attributes, i.e. bit rates, priorities and traffic classes, it is possible to formulate metrics to measure the performance of distinct services within the network domains, without any visibility of the content carried by upper layer protocols. Experimental results show good agreement between throughput measurements in the network and the corresponding measured values at the application layer in the mobile terminals.