Evaluation Methods for Quality of Service in Telecommunications

통신에 있어서 서비스품질 평가방법에 관한 고찰

Quality of Service(QoS) is the collective effect of service performances and has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. Although QoS is subjective, network performance parameters contributing to QoS can be measured physically. Therefore overall customer satisfaction for each test condition of the performance parameters is evaluated by asking respondents to indicate his or her opinion on a five-category rating scale i.e., excellent, good, fair, poor, and unsatisfactory. The opinion data resulting from the test can then be used to measure and analyze QoS from the customers' viewpoints. In this papaer, we consider two methods for analyzing the opinion data: MOS method and Cumulative Probability Curve method. The former evaluates an arithmetic mean of the opinion scores which quantify the surveyed opinions of respondents. The latter uses graphical and analytical models which are based on the distribution of the opinions rather than an arithmetic mean. The advantages, disadvantages, and an alternative of each method are discussed, together with future directions of research.