Endpoint report aggregation in unified communication systems

• US 8,295,191 B2
• Filed: 03/04/2008
• Issued: 10/23/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 03/04/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Leung, Yiu-Ming, Park, Jisun, Allio, Vincent, Levin, Danny, Zheng, Haoran, Liu, Xu, Herbison, Jay
• Primary Examiner(s): Ly, Anh-Vu
• Assistant Examiner(s): HOPKINS, MATTHEW A
• Application Number:
  US12/042,153
• Publication Number:
  US 20090225670A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,694 Days
• Field of Search: 379 3201- 3203, 379/221.08, 370/209, 370/252
• US Class Current: 370/252
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/022 Multivendor or multi-standard integration
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5032 Generating service level reports
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 41/5067 Customer-centric QoS measurements
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 24/08 Testing, supervising or monitoring using real traffic

Abstract

User quality of experience in a real time communication system is determined by analyzing endpoint performance metric reports correlated with performance factors of each endpoint in an endpoint profile for a more complete view of an audio/video quality of experience. Reports may include endpoint profile reports, which may be sent once at the beginning and then again only if an endpoint attribute changes; session reports, which include measured metric information and are sent at the conclusion of each session; and session interval reports, which also include metric information, but are sent during the session based on a period or a predefined threshold.

Claims

1. A method to be executed in a computing device for aggregating endpoint reports in a unified communication network (UCN), the method comprising:

receiving a plurality of endpoint profiles from a plurality of endpoints, wherein each endpoint profile of the plurality of endpoint profiles corresponds to one of the plurality of endpoints, and wherein each endpoint profile has endpoint attributes corresponding to the one of the plurality of endpoints comprising;

an endpoint name,

an endpoint hardware configuration, and

an endpoint software configuration;

receiving metric data associated with a plurality of call metrics for at least one communication session between two or more endpoints of the plurality of endpoints, wherein the metric data is received from at least one of the two or more endpoints;

correlating the metric data with two or more endpoint profiles corresponding to the two or more endpoints, wherein correlating the metric data with the two or more endpoint profiles comprises associating at least a portion of the metric data with at least two or more endpoint attributes corresponding to the two or more endpoints;

aggregating the correlated metric data and the two or more endpoint profiles based on predefined aggregation rules; and

generating a performance report based on the aggregated metric data and the two or more endpoint profiles, wherein the performance report identifies the two or more endpoint attributes as associated with at least the portion of the metric data, wherein the metric data is collected and the performance report is generated using object representations for aspects of the at least one communication session between the two or more endpoints, and wherein the object representations comprise;

at least one session object representing the at least one communication session;

at least one media line object representing at least one communication channel between the two or more endpoints during the at least one communication session; and

at least one stream object representing an exchange of information between the two or more endpoints, wherein the exchange of information comprises at least one of;

an audio exchange, a video exchange, an instant message exchange, and a data exchange.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

rendering the performance report through at least one from a set of;

displaying on a user interface, storing for subsequent retrieval, and providing to one of an analysis application, a scheduling application, and a presentation application.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the metric data is collected at one of:

a conclusion of the at least one communication session and an expiration of a predefined period.

4. The method of claim 3, further comprising issuing an alert in response to exceeding a predefined threshold value for metric data associated with at least one of the plurality of call metrics, wherein the alert is issued as one of:

a voice call, an instant message, an audio indication, a visual indication, and an audio-visual indication.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein each endpoint profile corresponding to each of the plurality of endpoints has endpoint attributes further comprising at least one of:

an endpoint application type, an endpoint driver type, and an endpoint operating system.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the endpoint attributes corresponding to each endpoint profile are collected for a first time when each endpoint of the plurality of endpoints becomes active and again only when the endpoint attributes change.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

collecting first endpoint attributes corresponding to a first endpoint profile of a first endpoint from the first endpoint; and

collecting second endpoint attributes corresponding to a second endpoint profile of the first endpoint from a remote endpoint communicating with the first endpoint, wherein the first endpoint attributes are more reliable than the second endpoint attributes.

8. The method of claim 7, further comprising aggregating the correlated metric data based on the first endpoint attributes corresponding to the first endpoint.

9. The method of claim 7, further comprising selecting the first endpoint attributes corresponding to the first endpoint profile from the first endpoint over endpoint attributes from other endpoints for the first endpoint when the first endpoint attributes corresponding to the first endpoint profile are available from the first endpoint.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the endpoint profiles corresponding to each of the two or more endpoints and the metric data are collected utilizing a standardized communication protocol and the performance report is generated utilizing a standard format such that the report is transmittable to and consumable by any application for one of:

analysis, scheduling, performing corrective actions, and presentation.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein the metric data associated with the plurality of call metrics are one of uniform for all endpoints of the plurality of endpoints and specific to at least one group of endpoints of the plurality of endpoints.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein the plurality of endpoints include one of:

an end device for facilitating communication through the UCN, an access server, a mediation server, an audio/video conferencing server, and a multipoint conferencing unit.

13. The method of claim 1, wherein the at least one communication session includes one of:

a voice call, a video call, an audio conference, a video conference, an instant message session, an electronic mail exchange, an application sharing session, and a data sharing session.

14. A computer-readable storage medium not consisting of a modulated data signal and having instructions stored thereon for aggregating endpoint performance reports in a unified communication network (UCN), the instructions comprising:

receiving a plurality of endpoint profiles from a plurality of endpoints, wherein each endpoint profile of the plurality of endpoint profiles corresponds to one of the plurality of endpoints, and wherein each endpoint profile has endpoint attributes corresponding to the one of the plurality of endpoints comprising;

an endpoint application type, an endpoint processing capacity, an endpoint memory capacity, an endpoint driver type, an endpoint operating system, and an endpoint communication characteristic;

collecting metric data associated with one or more communication sessions between two or more endpoints of the plurality of endpoints, wherein each communication session of the one or more communication sessions includes at least one of;

a voice call, a video call, an audio conference, a video conference, an instant message session, an electronic mail exchange, an application sharing session, and a data sharing session;

correlating the metric data with two or more endpoint profiles corresponding to the two or more endpoints, wherein correlating the metric data with the two or more endpoint profiles comprises associating at least a portion of the metric data with two or more endpoint attributes corresponding to the two or more endpoints;

aggregating the correlated metric data and the two or more endpoint profiles based on predefined aggregation rules, wherein the aggregation rules include selection of appropriate metric data for each endpoint if the metric data is collected from a plurality of sources;

generating a performance report in a standard format based on the aggregated correlated metric data and the two or more endpoint profiles, wherein the performance report identifies at least the two or more endpoint attributes as associated with at least the portion of the metric data, wherein the metric data is collected and the performance report is generated using object representations for aspects of the one or more communication sessions between the two or more endpoints, and wherein the object representations comprise;

at least one session object representing at least one of the one or more communication sessions;

at least one media line object representing at least one communication channel between the two or more endpoints during at least one of the one or more communication sessions; and

at least one stream object representing an exchange of information between the two or more endpoints, wherein the exchange of information comprises at least one of;

an audio exchange, a video exchange, an instant message exchange, and a data exchange; and

rendering the performance report via one of;

displaying on a user interface, storing for subsequent retrieval, and providing to one of an analysis application, a scheduling application, and a presentation application.

15. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein the metric data is collected multiple times during each communication session in response to one of:

an expiration of a predefined period and exceeding of a predefined threshold value.

16. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 14, wherein selection of appropriate metric data includes selection of metric data received from an endpoint that locally collected the metric data and corresponding endpoint profile over metric data received from another endpoint that remotely collected the metric data and the corresponding endpoint profile for the endpoint during a communication session.

17. A system for aggregating endpoint performance reports in a unified communication network (UCN), the system comprising:

a quality monitoring server (QMS) comprising at least one processing unit and at least one memory communicatively coupled to the at least one processing unit and containing computer-readable instructions that when executed by the at least one processor perform the following steps;

receiving a plurality of endpoint profiles from a plurality of endpoints, wherein each endpoint profile of the plurality of endpoint profiles corresponds to one of the plurality of endpoints, and wherein each endpoint profile has endpoint attributes corresponding to the one of the plurality of endpoints comprising;

an endpoint name,

an endpoint hardware configuration, and

an endpoint software configuration;

receiving metric data associated with a plurality of call metrics for at least one communication session between two or more endpoints of the plurality of endpoints, wherein the metric data is received from at least one of the two or more endpoints;

correlating the metric data with two or more endpoint profiles corresponding to the two or more endpoints, wherein correlating the metric data with the two or more endpoint profiles comprises associating at least a portion of the metric data with two or more endpoint attributes corresponding to the two or more endpoints;

aggregating the correlated metric data and the two or more endpoint profiles based on predefined aggregation rules; and

generating a performance report based on the aggregated metric data and the two or more endpoint profiles, wherein the performance report identifies the two or more endpoint attributes as associated with at least the portion of the metric data, wherein the metric data is collected and the performance report is generated using object representations for aspects of the at least one communication session between the two or more endpoints, and wherein the object representations comprise;

at least one session object representing the at least one communication session;

at least one media line object representing at least one communication channel between the two or more endpoints during the at least one communication session; and

at least one stream object representing an exchange of information between the two or more endpoints, wherein the exchange of information comprises at least one of;

an audio exchange, a video exchange, an instant message exchange, and a data exchange.

18. The system of claim 17, wherein the two or more endpoints are within a conference, further comprising:

correlating the metric data for the at least one communication session under a conference object using a conference identifier.

19. The system of claim 17, wherein the plurality of endpoints include at least one of:

an end device for facilitating communication through the UCN, an access server, a mediation server, an audio/video conferencing server, and a multipoint conferencing unit.