Quality of Service Assessment on Fixed-Wireless Broadband Internet Service the case of ethiotelecom
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Date
2019-02
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Commonly regulators and Internet service providers (ISPs) monitor and publish the offered
quality of service (QoS) to improve broadband Internet QoS focusing on transparency and
customer empowerment. This is aimed mainly to create competition between ISPs and provide
freedom of choice on best operators for customers which is mainly crucial in multi-operators
environment. Some of the researches done on differentiated customer traffic to improve QoS
mainly used metrics throughput, delay & packet loss only. While others use hardware QoS
measurement approach which is expensive than the software and challenging. Moreover other
researches on operators and regulators tried to improve QoS based only on performance
measurement which does not show the E2E QoS. Whereas in ET, the sole operator of Ethiopia,
fixed wireless broadband Internet (FWBBI) is provided in traditional or similar/ equitable
manners that is based on best efforts. Despite various customer traffics require variable QoS
requirements, some traffics require guaranteed bandwidth such as business critical data
applications and others like real time interactive application services such as Voice over Internet
(VoIP) and video conferencing are highly sensitive to delay, jitter and packet loss. Hence best
effort service offering does not guarantee business critical data applications and user satisfaction.
This research identifies important QoS metrics to apply in service level agreement (SLA). It also
provides QoS assessment result on FWBBI service from end-user perspective. The QoS
measurement is done by ICMP ping and testmy.net tools to get the actual quality the customers
are offered. Additionally MATLAB analysis is mainly done by probability distribution to show the
network capability in the design of QoS-SLA. The QoS result in FWBBI service showed that there
is fair quality on average throughput (52% of subscription speed) and packet loss (12%), while
delay (>400 ms) and jitter (>50 ms) values showed poor quality. The design of appropriate QoSSLA
is also delivered by this research. The FWBBI service QoS-SLA comprises three customer
traffic classes - gold (A), silver (B) and bronze (C). This classification is done by defining threshold
values for the metrics throughput, delay, jitter, and packet loss. Where this guaranteed level of
QoS allow ET to enhance QoS and support the current works to provide BB Internet SLA, improve
efficiency in resource utilization and creates transparency for enhancing customer satisfaction.
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Keywords
Delay, FWBBI, ICMP, Jitter, Packet Loss, PING, QoS, SLA, Throughput