Quality of experience of digital multimedia broadcasting services: An experimental study

Abstract

Digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB), also know as mobile TV, has been developed as a digital radio transmission technology that supports multimedia services such as TV, radio and datacasting. Especially, the terrestrial version of DMB, referred to as T-DMB, has been widely deployed in South Korea to deliver multimedia services to mobile devices ranging from smartphones to laptops, car navigation systems, and telematic devices for automotives. Although T-DMB is claimed to theoretically work without difficulties in vehicles with speeds up to 300 km/h, in practice, occasional skips and other temporal and spatial artifacts have been observed. In this paper, we provide an experimental study of the Quality of Experience (QoE) of T-DMB with focus on TV services. The study is based on a measurement campaign that was conducted in a live T-DMB system in South Korea consisting of TV broadcasters and DMB receivers in vehicles. In particular, a comprehensive subjective test has been conducted on the DMB test material that was obtained in the measurement campaign. A statistical analysis of the user ratings obtained from the subjective tests is reported to quantify the QoE of T-DMB in terms of mean opinion scores (MOSs) and higher order statistics. The obtained results may be used to develop related QoE models for this type of systems and services. In particular, the results may suggest to exploit insights obtained from higher order statistics such as skewness and kurtosis into QoE modeling rather than considering only MOS and variance.