QoE-Driven Sender Bitrate Adaptation Scheme for Video Applications over IP Multimedia Subsystem

Abstract

IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) offers a framework which enables the provisioning of multimedia services with Quality of Service (QoS) and mobility support across heterogeneous networks. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to present a new fuzzy logic based Sender Bitrate (SBR) adaptation scheme at pre-encoding stage that is Quality of Experience (QoE) driven for video applications. The scheme was tested and evaluated in the NS2 based simulation access networks of third generation Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) networks. Second, to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed adaptation scheme in our developed open Android-based IMS test bed. The test bed was developed to fully understand and manipulate the effects of network conditions on perceptual quality. The SBR adaptive scheme is evaluated in terms of the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). Extensive simulation and test bed results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptation scheme especially at UMTS bottleneck access networks where perceived video quality is most affected. The proposed scheme was responsive to available network bandwidth and congestion and adapted the SBR accordingly maintaining acceptable quality in terms of the MOS. The proposed scheme has applications in network planning and content provisioning for network/service providers.