Introduction of an Analytical Figure of Merit for Quality of Service Measurement

Investigations performed for future applications in various research areas allow users to communicate over more than one radio access technology with one single device. Thus, user terminals need methods to specify the quality of service provided by a radio access technology in order to decide about the radio access technology being used for a certain service or even to consider a possible change of an operator. In this paper a quality of service measure is proposed that allows the evaluation of services by certain service parameters, as, for example, a data transmission may be judged by the bit error rate, the overall network data rate or the delay. The measure defined in this paper bases on simple observation of frames resp. packets and can be applied for the assessment of any service property whose validity can be characterized by a simple decision whether or not a given quality of service was fulfilled.