Testing QoS Aspects in Multimedia Applications

Assuring and proofing the quality of multimedia applications and services by means of testing will be a great challenge for manufacturers and service providers. Standardized methods and tools for conformance testing are applicable to traditional protocols (i.e., a single data stream, no timing requirements) only. In this paper we discuss a testing methodology and framework for testing multimedia applications. We started to develop and implement a new <em>Tel</em>e<em>Com</em>munication <em>T</em>est <em>S</em>pecification and implementation <em>L</em>anguage (TelCom TSL). TelCom TSL is meant to be a tool for specifying and implementing test cases for (distributed) multimedia applications. TelCom TSL defines a novel testing architecture. Its formal syntax and semantics definition with real-time extensions makes TelCom TSL applicable for testing multimedia applications. The contributions of this paper are an analysis of different QoS semantics in the context of multimedia applications, a definition of QoS testing and the TelCom TSL testing architecture.