Quality of experience issues in multimedia provision

Abstract

Currently, the success of providing novel multimedia services over wired/wireless networks depends on how good the quality of the service is and whether it meets an end user’s expectations. Thus, it is critical for equipment manufacturers, network operators and service providers to be able to assess, predict and possibly control the end-to-end perceptual multimedia (e.g., voice and video) quality for commercial and technical reasons. The Quality of Service (QoS) perceived as user satisfaction has received through past years some efforts from the research community, introducing the concept of the Quality of Experience (QoE). The evaluation of the QoE will provide an end user with a range of potential choices, covering the possibilities of low, medium, or high quality levels. This QoE evaluation will also give service providers and network operators the capability to minimize the storage and network resources by allocating only the ones that are necessary to maintain a specific level of user satisfaction. This special issue focuses on novel accurate, efficient and robust QoE models for multimedia services, including both VoIP and video services, novel QoE-driven cross-layer architectures, including performance evaluation, traffic man-