QoE estimation of compound services in significance-aware packet networks

The paper presents a method to protect more significant packets of a compound service transported via User Datagram Protocol (UDP) at the expense of dropping less significant packets in case of network congestion. This requires a mapping scheme that allows lower layers (e.g., the data link layer) to inherit some “significance” information from the application layer. This information is used by the network elements for packet drop decisions. That mapping scheme combined with the additional insertion of packets conveying statistical information about the compound stream simplifies the quality of service measurements along the network path. In order to capture the timing behavior of packet transport (e.g., jitter) a virtual buffer is also introduced, allowing a simplified measurement of acceptable packet delay variation. Both measures allow a quality of experience (QoE) estimation without the need for complex service processing.