Novel AHP-based QoE factors' selection approach

Abstract

Due to the accelerating uptake of multimedia services over Internet, Quality of Experience (QoE) assessment has become a topic of prime importance. While current QoE prediction models focus on technology-centered Quality of Service (QoS) parameters as the main influencing keys on user's perception quality, they do not sufficiently address the following question: “Based upon QoS, is it competent to understand the overall QoE?” Two limitations on QoE models have been noticed: (1) lack of factors introducing in assessment models, and (2) studies that examine the impact of each factors on QoE are limited. The need to take a more holistic view of influencing QoE factors has steered researchers towards an in-depth study on the multidimensional aspect of QoE. In order to tackle this challenge and giving the growing importance of understanding QoE and the factors influencing it, our contribution in this paper is to give a solution to get around limits mentioned above. This paper proposes a proper design of selection factor based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) derived from a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) theory. The result shows that due to our model, we can retrieve a ranking of the influential factors. The relevant goal of this paper is to give a structured process that examines influencing factors on QoE. Future QoE assessment models can benefit from applying our proposed model in order to build a QoE model as realistic as possible.