Abstract: Given the limiting nature of the communication channel in a communication system, the end user applications (such as browsers, FTP clients, media clients) experience certain effects of the communication channel. These effects, such as delay, throughput, error rates, variation in delay etc. constitute the elements that make up for the user experience or "service". The teletraffic engineering world was a relatively simpler world in the voice telephony era and very effective techniques of measuring and engineering service quality are in place. In this section we shall consider only the packet data networks and use the term “network” to mean “packet data network”. |