Today's digital economy, dominated and driven by the growing commercial outlook of the Internet, has stimulated the demand for broadband networking as well as Quality of Service (QoS) architectures to achieve application performance and user satisfaction. Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) is gaining prominence as a cost-effective broadband access solution for high speed Internet access, being widely deployed nationwide. The promise and potential to handle applications like Video on Demand over ADSL has set the stage to engineer and evaluate QoS in ADSL systems. As a first step in this direction, the various issues applicable to QoS over ADSL are discussed and a test setup was developed to evaluate the QoS metrics with respect to the physical layer characteristics of ADSL systems. The results of the preliminary set of experiments and the insight gained from these will be presented along with recommendations for future work.
