Quality assurance management: Network and service performance evaluation

The Next Generation Network's ecosystem comprises of both the revolutionary voice and data services and their supporting networks. This ecosystem's management of the quality assurance requires complex data processing and analysis that draw on the interdependency of the QoS and QoE metrics that govern the network and the supported services, respectively. These interdependencies build the QoE - QoS cycle and they are governed by four gaps (execution, value, alignment, and perception), which represent variables of the quality assurance process. The tandem tuning, controlling and optimization of these gaps is based on service's QoE monitoring along with its relationship and mapping to the network's QoS. The QoS performance monitoring is based on bearer service attributes of the subscribed QoS profile. The QoE evaluation requires algorithms to objectively assess subscriber perception for media content (voice, audio, video) and other services' characteristics. A feedback-loop system (Observe-Plan-Act) can assist the quality assurance process.