Quality of Experience Engineering for Customer Added Value Services: From Evaluation to Monitoring

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Quality of Experience Estimators in Networks

Frédéric GUYARD, Martin VARELA, Lea SKORIN-KAPOV, Antonio CUADRA-SANCHEZ and Pedro J. SEVILLA-RAMOS.

11.1. Introduction

Quality of Experience (QoE) is a domain that has seen an explosive growth in the past few years. Situated at a confluence of several disciplines, ranging from networking, through signal processing and multimedia to social science and economics, it is an inherently multi-disciplinary domain. This makes it very interesting, but poses several problems, as practitioners from the different fields involved have different, and sometimes conflicting views about it. Issues of terminology, research methodologies and application domains can become troublesome when working in this context.

The Celtic Plus Quality of Experience Estimators in Networks (QuEEN) project was conceived to create a suitable conceptual framework for QoE, and make it operational by means of a suitable software architecture and quality models for different services, covering the full stack from the infrastructure on which a service runs, to the user who experiences it. In this chapter, we will present some of the conceptual results produced so far within QuEEN (and other related activities, such as COST Action IC1003 Qualinet). Mechanisms for making these concepts operational are then proposed. More precisely we present a way to theoretically model QoE for any type of (online) service, and a way to go from these theoretical models to concrete implementations. ...