Minkowski Distance as a Quality of Service Assessment Tool

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to describe an approach to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) of multimedia applications by considering their QoS parameters (i.e., delay, jitter, packet losses) requirements. Audio application was considered for this purpose because of the time-sensitive nature of their QoS requirements. In this work, the objective of QoS assessment is to evaluate the performance of the employed networks to investigate whether they satisfy the requirements of different applications that were sharing the same infrastructure over them. This involved devising a new QoS assessment technique that combines and summarizes the QoS parameters in a single value. This value represents the QoS level provided to the multimedia applications based on the network conditions compared to the QoS level expected for those applications. The devised assessment approach is based on Euclidean and Minkowski distance measures. The proposed approach simplifies the complexity of QoS assessment using simple and mathematically and very straightforward technique based on one equation and a simple mapping process. The obtained results using the devised approach reflects the actual QoS provided by the network for multimedia applications and were comparable to results obtained by some other proposed approaches.