Grade of service

In telecommunication engineering, and in particular teletraffic engineering, the quality of voice service is specified by two measures: the grade of service (GoS) and the quality of service (QoS). In telecommunication engineering, and in particular teletraffic engineering, the quality of voice service is specified by two measures: the grade of service (GoS) and the quality of service (QoS). Grade of service is the probability of a call in a circuit group being blocked or delayed for more than a specified interval, expressed as a vulgar fraction or decimal fraction. This is always with reference to the busy hour when the traffic intensity is the greatest. Grade of service may be viewed independently from the perspective of incoming versus outgoing calls, and is not necessarily equal in each direction or between different source-destination pairs. 'Grade of Service' sometimes means a measure of inbound call center traffic to verify adherence to conditions to measure the success of customers served. On the other hand, the quality of service which a single circuit is designed or conditioned to provide, e.g. voice grade or program grade is called the quality of service. Quality criteria for such circuits may include equalization for amplitude over a specified band of frequencies, or in the case of digital data transported via analogue circuits, may include equalization for phase. Criteria for mobile quality of service in cellular telephone circuits include the probability of abnormal termination of the call. When a user attempts to make a telephone call, the routing equipment handling the call has to determine whether to accept the call, reroute the call to alternative equipment, or reject the call entirely. Rejected calls occur as a result of heavy traffic loads (congestion) on the system and can result in the call either being delayed or lost. If a call is delayed, the user simply has to wait for the traffic to decrease, however if a call is lost then it is removed from the system. The Grade of Service is one aspect of the quality a customer can expect to experience when making a telephone call. In a Loss System, the Grade of Service is described as that proportion of calls that are lost due to congestion in the busy hour. For a Lost Call system, the Grade of Service can be measured using Equation 1. For a delayed call system, the Grade of Service is measured using three separate terms: The Grade of Service can be measured using different sections of a network. When a call is routed from one end to another, it will pass through several exchanges. If the Grade of Service is calculated based on the number of calls rejected by the final circuit group, then the Grade of Service is determined by the final circuit group blocking criteria. If the Grade of Service is calculated based on the number of rejected calls between exchanges, then the Grade of Service is determined by the exchange-to-exchange blocking criteria. The Grade of Service should be calculated using both the access networks and the core networks as it is these networks that allow a user to complete an end-to-end connection. Furthermore, the Grade of Service should be calculated from the average of the busy hour traffic intensities of the 30 busiest traffic days of the year. This will cater for most scenarios as the traffic intensity will seldom exceed the reference level.