Page 44 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Consumer Experience and Protection

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Consumer Experience and Protection

Background class

When the end-user, that typically is a computer, sends and receives data-files in the background, this scheme
applies. Examples are background delivery of E-mails, SMS, and download of databases and reception of
measurement records.

Background traffic is one of the classical data communication schemes that on an overall level is characterised
by that the destination is not expecting the data within a certain time. The scheme is thus more or less delivery
time insensitive. Another characteristic is that the content of the packets shall be transparently transferred
(with low bit error rate).
Background traffic - fundamental characteristics for QoS:

– the destination is not expecting the data within a certain time;

– preserve payload content.
In order to have a specific service transported in the appropriate QoS class, it has to be recognized by the
protocol instances to which class it belongs. This is of special importance in cases where new services demand
for close to real-time transmission and make use of existing services.

The best example in this context is a financial service which makes use of the SMS service. Without any
additional measures taken, the network does not recognize the financial service but only the SMS service
and will transmit it in the background class. In consequence the financial service is not being provided
with the necessary real-time transmission.

Recommendation ITU-T E.804 “Quality of service aspects for popular services in mobile networks” provides
sets of quality of service (QoS) parameters from an end-user's perspective for the operational aspects of
mobile communication. As services per se are not standardized, it focuses on popular services, which means
commonly or widely used services.

This does not preclude applying the definitions in this Recommendation for other (not widely used) services,
if feasible.

It provides QoS parameter (KPI) definitions for mobile services and related trigger points. Furthermore, it
discusses all aspects of practical application thereof, including field testing and statistical considerations.

Currently, DFS as a specifically defined end to end service is not included in Recommendation ITU-T E.804.
Services on which actual DFS implementations are based – such as SMS or http – are however treated in in
broad detail.

Note: SMS is a store and forward service which – without modifications – cannot be used for real-time
transactions which will be required for certain transaction types of DFS

Recommendation ITU-T G.1040 “Network contribution to transaction time” provides the definition, description,
and examples of the network contribution to transaction time (NCTT) performance metric for short data
transactions with relevance to network providers and users. This is a metric derived primarily from the
performance characteristics of the user-network interface to user-network interface (UNI-UNI) path, although
it also uses limited configuration information from clients and hosts.

This performance metric is intended to be applied in situations where packet network communications are
used to complete repetitive data transactions, such as credit card authorization for purchase, and where
measurements of the supporting network's performance are available.

The NCTT metric is derived from packet transfer delays and packet loss ratios from client to host and host
to client, effectively a round-trip across the network. Measurements will usually supply the needed network
characterization.

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