A Whole New Ballgame: Measuring the Perception of Quality in a Network

14 June 2021

For public and private network operators, the old adage, “you can’t measure what you can’t see”, has traditionally been addressed with vendor- and equipment-specific systems and tools.

These network equipment management systems (NEMS) each provide data on the performance of an individual network device. Operations personnel are left to paste together the disparate data to obtain a complete picture of network operations well after the fact.

Quality of Service (QoS) tools may come to the rescue. These are designed for operators to see the overall performance of a network service – say video or voice – across the network.

Today, forces are coalescing into the need for a very different and even more holistic picture of network performance:

Networks are increasingly complex, especially in the Industrial IoT (IIoT) space, comprising several regions, geographies, multiple vendors, and mobile network operators (MNOs)
Customer needs are changing as enterprises seek to leverage IoT to improve operations, customer service, and more
Network virtualization is increasing, which reduces visibility into network performance compared to monitoring physical hardware

For these reasons, talk of QoS is evolving to a newer concept: Quality of Experience (QoE). QoE is a measurement of the satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) of a customer’s experience of a service (e.g. streaming media, enterprise VoIP calls, or an underground private LTE network).

QoE shifts focus to the perceived quality of using a network versus the statistical facts of the network’s operation.

QoE network analytics is a whole new ballgame. How, exactly, does one measure a perception of quality? How can a perception of quality be derived when it depends on the performance of heterogenous networks?

This is the problem Cheetah Networks solves with our ARTINA™ AI-driven network analytics engine and PulseView™ Solution. ARTINA ™ gathers and correlates real-time analytics from anywhere in a network and delivers the intelligence to PulseView™. The PulseView™ user interface delivers – on a single pane of glass – real-time visualizations of edge-to-cloud network performance in a QoE score for applications and services.

Both private and public network operators, business leaders, network users, and other stakeholders use the PulseView™ Solution to quickly visualize and act on this knowledge of the QoE experienced by people, machines, and applications connected to the network.