A general QoE assessment framework for applications and services

Abstract

In this paper, we have designed a testbed to evaluate end-to-end Quality of Experience (QoE) performance for mobile applications and devices in a controllable and repeatable manner. Various network scenarios have been defined which allow replication of real-life conditions in a controlled environment. The general testbed framework is presented, which is comprised of a deconstruction process and an aggregation process. A convergence study of the testbed has been carried out to identify the required number of iterations for achieving stable results, and human panel experiments have been introduced to calibrate the performance of the testbed. A case study of two use cases, i.e. content streaming and high-speed internet, is presented with focus on the user experience domain. The measurement results have demonstrated the measurement capability of the proposed testing methodology, which is flexible to generalize the QoE computations for many of the use cases. It is shown that with the help of the testbed, we can better understand how radio resources and propagation channel models will influence the performance of the application/service under test.