MINER has its origin in quality of service (QoS) evaluation in IP networks. An early predecessor of MINER, called CMToolset, has been used more than 10 years ago to drive systematic performance evaluation studies of QoS architectures in field trials (EU ICT project AQUILA).  Due to the fact that MINER can accommodate arbitrary tools, passive and active measurements can be conducted and correlated on all layers of the TCP/IP stack. A single MINER scenario can e.g. measure the signal strength, IP metrics, as well as perceptual quality metrics.

Reference projects

In this context the following reference projects have been carried out:

• Evaluation of perceptual VoIP quality in the cable network of an Austrian ISP. The primary goal was to determine how the signal-to-noise ratio maps to the speech quality. To this end we created a MinerTool that reads SNR values from the cable modems via SNMP. Additional tools emulated the voice stream and measured – according to IPPM standards – IP quality metrics which were then mapped to the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) using the E-model.
• A similar study was made in a governmental infrastructure.
• At the end of the year MINER will be used to actively assess the IP quality metrics in a German network connecting emergency control centers.