Quality of Experience in Convergent Communication Ecosystems

Abstract

While for several decades research in telecommunications has been strongly focusing on engineering aspects, more recently a clear trend towards more interdisciplinary approaches has evolved and is about to result in a significant paradigm change. More specifically, the holistic characterization of systems of private and business customers, which interact with each other using telecommunication services, together with the underlying technological environment (including e.g., networks as well as customer equipment), has led to establishing the notion of ‘Communication Ecosystems’. In this chapter, we focus on recent advances in Quality of Experience (QoE) as a key example for the corresponding interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of cutting-edge technology, microeconomics and user-centered approaches. We start by describing the paradigm change from QoS to QoE and its implications for convergent communication systems, and focus subsequently on the search for the underlying laws of QoE. Based on that, we also address the question of how to charge for QoE and discuss the corresponding fixpoint problem which results from the double role of charging as input and output factor for a subjective quality evaluation. Finally, we summarize the most important directions for future work in this exciting and highly topical area of research.