Quality Of Experience Prediction Research Articles

User feedback oriented quality of experience management framework

Recently, Quality of Experience (QoE) has been introduced as a subjective measure of a user's experience of communication services. QoE was expected to take the place of traditional Quality of Service (QoS) measure in that QoE may express a direct and accurate user experience. In this paper, we propose a QoE management scheme which is based on a user's simple feedback. We explain the proposed QoE management steps and the dominant reason extraction algorithm to determine the quality-falling instance. We also present a QoE prediction method that will provide an optimal quality management scheme in communication services. Experiments on multimedia streaming service prove the efficiency of the dominant factor extraction algorithm, and the experiment using the QoE prediction method present a very high accuracy. The QoE management scheme proposed in this paper can be generally adapted to any communication services, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of quality management systems.

QoE Prediction Model and its Application in Video Quality Adaptation Over UMTS Networks

The primary aim of this paper is to present a new content-based, non-intrusive quality of experience (QoE) prediction model for low bitrate and resolution (QCIF) H.264 encoded videos and to illustrate its application in video quality adaptation over Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS) networks. The success of video applications over UMTS networks very much depends on meeting the QoE requirements of users. Thus, it is highly desirable to be able to predict and, if appropriate, to control video quality to meet such QoE requirements. Video quality is affected by distortions caused both by the encoder and the UMTS access network. The impact of these distortions is content dependent, but this feature is not widely used in non-intrusive video quality prediction models. In the new model, we chose four key parameters that can impact video quality and hence the QoE-content type, sender bitrate, block error rate and mean burst length. The video quality was predicted in terms of the mean opinion score (MOS). Subjective quality tests were carried out to develop and evaluate the model. The performance of the model was evaluated with unseen dataset with good prediction accuracy ( ~ 93%). The model also performed well with the LIVE database which was recently made available to the research community. We illustrate the application of the new model in a novel QoE-driven adaptation scheme at the pre-encoding stage in a UMTS network. Simulation results in NS2 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptation scheme, especially at the UMTS access network which is a bottleneck. An advantage of the model is that it is light weight (and so it can be implemented for real-time monitoring), and it provides a measure of user-perceived quality, but without requiring time-consuming subjective tests. The model has potential applications in several other areas, including QoE control and optimization in network planning and content provisioning for network/service providers.

Quality of Experience Models for Multimedia Streaming

Understanding how quality is perceived by viewers of multimedia streaming services is essential for efficient management of those services. Quality of Experience (QoE) is a subjective metric that quantifies the perceived quality, which is crucial in the process of optimizing tradeoff between quality and resources. However, accurate estimation of QoE often entails cumbersome studies that are long and expensive to execute. In this regard, the authors present a QoE estimation methodology for developing Machine Learning prediction models based on initial restricted-size subjective tests. Experimental results on subjective data from streaming multimedia tests show that the Machine Learning models outperform other statistical methods achieving accuracy greater than 90%. These models are suitable for real-time use due to their small computational complexity. Even though they have high accuracy, these models are static and cannot adapt to environmental change. To maintain the accuracy of the prediction models, the authors have adopted Online Learning techniques that update the models on data from subjective viewer feedback. This method provides accurate and adaptive QoE prediction models that are an indispensible component of a QoE-aware management service.