User-Oriented QoE Metrics and Subjective Assessment for Video Streaming Services on 3G Mobile Internet

Abstract

To provide customer-satisfied video streaming services over 3G, network services providers turn to measure the video quality in term of quality of experience (QoE) rather than quality of service (QOS). In formal QoE definitions for video streaming services over 3G, QoE is either regarded as the average user opinion from the subjective point of view or combination of some technical parameters from the objective point of view. Hence, to reflect the true user-perceived video/audio quality effects and to find the user perception on these metrics, this paper proposes a set of intuitive and pure user-oriented QoE metrics, and a corresponding subjective assessment framework, where distorted video samples are generated by mapping from a simple End-to End QoS (EQoS) metric set and a new subjective assessment method, User Satisfaction Threshold Measurement (USTM), is designed, in addition to the usage of traditional Absolute Category Rating with Hidden Reference (ACR-HR). As the results, four user satisfaction thresholds, and multi-level user opinions, are obtained and further mapped to the parameters in EQoS, providing useful guidelines for network plans, source productions and player deployment; and the user’s attention degrees for these metrics are also obtained, offering good references to end-terminal objective video quality measurement algorithms. The metric set and the assessment framework have already been adopted by China Mobile to clarify the user requirements for their video streaming services.