A Model for Mapping between the Quality of Service and Experience for Wireless Multimedia Applications

Abstract

With nowadays evolution of wireless network technologies and the growth of novel wireless multimedia services it is critical for network and service providers to be able to assess user's perceptual multimedia quality, for commercial and technical reasons. As so, we present wireless network services and applications characterization requirements, updated to current specifications. We considered recommendations for some major regulations entities, such as the ITU, 3GPP, WiMAX Forum and the European project EU-MESH. In the case of audio and video applications, the latest and most used encoding schemes were addressed by considering the WiMAX Forum recommendations. In turn, as not only the Quality of Service (QoS) needs to be addressed, we propose a model for the mapping between QoS parameters and user's Quality of Experience (QoE) for multimedia applications. Measurable QoS parameters can be gathered throughout the network and mapped into an effective QoE estimation. The model has been obtained by means of mathematical regression and the fittings are validated by analysing the coefficient of determination, R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , between the results from our model and MOS experimental values. The achieved results are R <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> = 0.94, 0.84 and 0.98 for gaming, video and audio, respectively. The corresponding mean square error is approximately zero in all cases.