A passive test and measurement system: Traffic sampling for QoS evaluation

We present a test and measurement system with real time end-to-end monitoring capabilities able to provide reliable performance evaluations through sampling techniques. Sampling is introduced for relieving the complexity of management functions, which are usually carried out by means of heavy routines dealing with a huge amount of data, especially in the current heterogeneous broadband networks providing several services with multimedia traffic. Our results show how to manage the trade-off between the sampling rate and attained estimation accuracy, representing a theoretical/quantitative method usable by network operators to design control instrumentation.