By Tom Cloonan, Jim Allen, Tony Cotter, Ben Widrevitz, ARRIS
This paper will discuss reasons why current methods of DOCSIS Quality of Experience (QoE) Monitoring are becoming obsolete. It will be shown that the monitoring of channel utilization alone can often lead to erroneous conclusions.
The paper will discuss the impact of Service Level Agreement (SLA) settings on QoE monitoring, offering two different philosophies that an MSO can choose to follow (SLA-agnostic vs. SLA-dependent). It will also be shown that QoE monitoring tools and CMTS scheduling algorithms may benefit when more tightly coupled with adaptive CMTS scheduling algorithms that can utilize monitoring tool outputs and with monitoring tools becoming more cognizant of the CMTS scheduling philosophies for different SLAs.
The paper will identify the various traffic metrics that can be utilized for QoE monitoring, and it will then discuss the fact that different traffic types are sensitive to different traffic metrics and have different thresholds determining acceptable QoE Levels.
Finally, the paper will describe and illustrate necessary attributes of second-generation DOCSIS QoE Monitoring tools.