Dissertation (MSc Information Technology)The growth in demand of multimedia applications such as file transfer, audio, video and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) traffics have introduced the high need of good Quality of Services (QoS) through network devices like routers which led to the effect on Quality of Experience (QoE) to end-users. The QoS and QoE of the video streaming, file application and VoIP calls services on the low-cost Virtual Software Router (VSR) such as Vyatta and high-cost Hardware Router (HR) such as Cisco conducted through the local area network were evaluated. The emulation study was conducted through a testbed and the QoS and QoE parameters used were delay, jitter and MOS. The data was collected through Wireshark network analyser. Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis were done through MATLAB R2016a and SPSS respectively. It was found that HR performs higher on voice calls and file application services but lower performance in video streaming compared to VSR in terms of delay and jitter. Voice calls and video application service performs high on VSR but lower in file application service compared to HR in terms of delay and jitter. It was further found that both HR and VSR achieved good QoS performance in terms of delay and jitter for the voice application service compared to other services. The results for QoE revealed that the voice application showed better user satisfaction experience in HR followed by file and video application services. Moreover, it was found that the voice application service showed high satisfaction to users followed by video streaming and file application service in VSR