Measuring End-to-End Quality of a News-on-Demand Web Service

A key issue in any system for distribution of continuous media-on-demand is the capacity of the system with regard to quality of the service specifications, that is, the number of simultaneous streams the system can provide until degradation of quality of reproduction and interactivity perceived by the users. This work presents the evaluation of a web based interactive video-on-demand system, with special attention to limitations caused by the video server. The evaluation is based on the measurement of the end-to-end quality of the service. A set of metrics has been designed to determine the number of streams the video server can support under specific quality requirements. To validate the utility of these metrics, a prototype of a news-on-demand web service has been built and the load for this kind of systems has been characterised. In addition, a load generator which emulates the concurrent access of several users to the system has been built. The evaluation establishes the relationship between the video server limitations and the quality of the service perceived by the users.