End-to-end performance measurement of Internet based medical applications.

We present a method to obtain an end-to-end characterization of the performance of an application over a network. This method is not dependent on any specific application or type of network. The method requires characterization of network parameters, such as latency and packet loss, between the expected server or client endpoints, as well as characterization of the application's constraints on these parameters. A subjective metric is presented that integrates these characterizations and that operates over a wide range of applications and networks. We believe that this method may be of wide applicability as research and educational applications increasingly make use of computation and data servers that are distributed over the Internet.