The tremendous power and low price of today's computer systems have created the opportunity for exciting applications rich with graphics, audio and video. In order to live up to their potential, these multimedia applications must meet the performance needs of the users they support. In particular, multimedia performance is dependent upon delay, jitter and data loss. In this chapter, we present end-to-end methods to determining delay, jitter and data loss. Furthermore, we tie delay, jitter and data loss into a perceptual quality metric that quantitatively evaluates application performance from the user perspective. As an example, we work through the application of our performance metric to a videoconference.

Postscript available upon request.