E-Quality

The knowledge centre E-Quality ("Expertise Centre on Performance and Quality of Service in ICT") has been founded in July 2005 by the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), TNO ICT and the University of Twente (UT/CTIT). With this cooperation it is intended to meet a growing need within the IT world to better manage and improve the quality of services and applications in an increasing complex IT environment (networks, IT systems).

Aim

E-Quality aims to perform innovative research within the field of "QoS control" in current and future IT environments, educate experts, and to propagate the importance of the research area. The ambition is to reach an international top position, with a clear spin-off to applications of this research into the market.

Realisation

E-Quality aims to reach these goals and ambitions by combining current expertise, initiating and fine-tuning new research (a.o. within the framework of national and European research programmes), holding courses, organising workshops, etc. Initially, the basis is formed by the research of 4 PhD students, cooperatively funded by CWI, TNO and UT.

Organisation

The daily management of E-Quality is carried out by a management team of professors from the initial participating research groups of CWI, TNO ICT and UT/CTIT. The scientific directors of the participating research institutes form the the Steering Committee. The knowledge centre E-Quality is housed at the UT within the department Design & Analysis of Communication systems.

Focus

The QoS area of research is broad; in order to focus, the following choices have been made for the initial period:

·	Mobile/wireless access networks (UMTS/HSDPA, WLAN, ad-hoc networks, PANs, etc. and the 'seamless' integration of these access networks);

·	Distributed service and information platforms (e.g., web application-server platforms).

Rapid technological developments will cause an enormous boost to the development of new services and applications. At the same time, mobile access networks and service/information platforms may become more and more a bottleneck w.r.t. quality (end-to-end QoS) of services and applications. This is caused by the relatively limited (and dificult to efficiently use) radio capacity within mobile networks, as well as the increasing complexity of the service/information platforms (a.o., due to being more and more distributed). Control of the end-to-end QoS will become more complicated through the growing diversity of the applications, and the fact that the use of these applications is more difficult to predict, whilst at the same time the requirements w.r.t. to QoS will be increased.

Specific research issues are:

·	Network- and system planning

·	Resource- and capacity management

·	Performance evaluation and monitoring

·	QoS differentiation

·	Measurement techniques (performance, load/traffic)

·	Traffic modelling

·	Traffic management

·	SLA specification and management