Crowd-sourcing framework to assess QoE

Abstract

The quality assessment of multimedia services as perceived by the end-user is a challenging task. In a controlled environment, it is easy to measure the user's Quality of Experience (QoE) against the influence of controlled network parameters. However, in an uncontrolled environment, it is difficult to measure the Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by end-users, due to the unpredictable behaviour of networks. Crowd-sourcing is an emerging technique that can be employed to measure the QoE at the end user, but in an uncontrolled environment. In this paper, we present a tool implementing a crowd-sourcing framework, that measures the QoE of online video streaming, as perceived by end-users. The tool also measures important QoS network parameters in real-time (packet loss, delay, jitter and throughput), retrieves system information (memory, processing power etc.), and other properties of the end-user's system. The proposed approach provides the opportunity to explore the user's quality perception in a wider domain.