Mapping quality of perception to quality of service for a runtime-adaptable communication system

In this paper we describe collaborative work between two projects at the University of Reading. We define Quality of Perception (QoP) as representing the user side of the more technical and traditional Quality of Service (QoS). QoP is a term which encompasses not only a user's satisfaction with the quality of multimedia presentations, but also his/her ability to analyze, synthesize and assimilate the informational content of multimedia displays. The Dynamically Reconfigurable Protocol Stacks (DRoPS) project addresses issues of runtime reconfigurable transport systems. Network architectures that do not support resource reservation are unable to guarantee fundamental connection characteristics such as delay, jitter, throughput, loss and bit error rates. The DRoPS architecture supports low cost reconfiguration of individual protocol mechanisms in an attempt to best maintain QoP in connections where the provided QoS fluctuates unpredictably.