VoIP Quality Measurement System Using Flow Mediation for Large-Scale IP Networks

We present the development of a VoIP quality of service (QoS) measurement system that enables operators to diagnose a QoS degradation segment. Our system uses a flow-based passive measurement method to fulfill the requirement for QoS measurement in large-scale IP networks. In particular, we adopt an access control list (ACL)-based filtering function that selects traffic to monitor and develop a function for correlating signals and media data records. This correlation function is required to dynamically configure ACL-based filtering for monitoring media streams whose port numbers are determined by a signaling protocol. To improve the scalability of existing measurement systems, we also develop a hardware-based filtering engine on a commercial switch as well as a mediation box that performs QoS calculation based on traffic records exported by the engine in a distributed manner. We demonstrate the feasibility of the measurement system by evaluating a prototype system.