QoE Assessment for IoT-Based Multi Sensorial Media Broadcasting

Abstract

One of the goals of next generation TV broadcast services is to provide realistic media contents to the users. The user's sense of reality can be reinforced by adding to conventional media multiple sensorial effects, through five-sense stimulus (i.e., taste, sight, touch, smell, and hearing). In a smart TV broadcasting context, especially in a home environment, to deliver the additional effects, customary devices (e.g., air conditioning, lights, etc.), provided of opportune smart features, have to be preferred to ad-hoc devices, often deployed in other applications as for example in gaming systems. In this context, a key issue is the interconnection among the smart TV and the customary devices that deliver the additional sensorial effects to the user. In smart home use cases, the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has been widely adopted to connect smart devices and this paper presents an IoT-based architecture for multi sensorial media delivery to TV users in a home entertainment scenario. In such a framework, home customary devices, act as smart objects interconnected via IoT network to the smart TV and play a role to implement additional effects to the conventional broadcast TV service. In this paper, the requirements in terms of synchronization between media and devices is analyzed and the architecture of the system is defined accordingly. Furthermore, a prototype is implemented in a real smart home scenario with real customary devices, which allowed a subjective test measurement campaign to assess the quality of experience of the users and the feasibility of the proposed multi sensorial media TV service.