User-perceived Quality Of Service Research Articles

Analysis of the Effect of Service Quality on Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction Using Expectation Confirmation Model and Servqual

he application of technology that can be used to support the buying and selling transaction system is e-commerce. The purpose of this study is to determine user perceptions of service quality and identify factors that have the greatest influence on user satisfaction and loyalty. The number of samples in this study were 315 respondents who were e-commerce users for at least one year. Sampling was carried out using purposive sampling technique. The data analysis process is carried out based on the PLS-SEM approach with SmartPLS software version 3.3.3. The model used is a combination of the ServQual model with the Expectation Confirmation Model (ECM). Overall, this study found that users' perceptions of service quality are dissatisfied with reliability and tangibels services. Of the 5 hypotheses accepted, the factors that influence satisfaction are assurance and the factors that influence customer loyalty are reliability, tangibels, assurance and satisfaction.

Assessing the Impact of Non-Teaching Services on Postgraduate Students’ Satisfaction: A Case of alternative Providers of Higher Education in the UK

The research sought to assess the impact of non-teaching services on postgraduate (Pg) students’ satisfaction, focusing on the alternative provider of higher education in the UK. The ‘service provision’ is known generically as the ‘students support department’ and is argued to provide a more effective means of engagement between the learning process of Pg courses and students. The study is underpinned by the conceptual model proposed by Parasuraman et al. (1995), where it was proposed: A Multiple - Item Scale for Measuring Service User Perceptions of Service Quality. The argument proposed in this research project is that non-teaching services currently delivered by alternative providers of higher education are subject to many shortcomings. In a refinement of the SEVQUAL model, the study showed that there was a low level of student satisfaction with the current level of non-teaching services delivered at the alternative institutions; on all the key service dimensions to reduce the existing gap between expectation and service encountered. The current study argues that a new approach is needed to improve and sustain a positive learning experience for Pg students through the effective delivery of non-teaching services. For this study, the service gap is assessed as the average perception score (APS), perceived service, minus average expectation score (AES); students’ expectations from the alternative providers, and the difference is the service gap (SG). The service dimension gap equation is (1) ASP – AES = SG (1.90708 - 2.7559 = - 0. 84882). The results reveal that the overall perceived service quality is low with a value of (-0.8415), with students’ expectations score of 2.7559, and a perception score of (1.90708). While the overall service gap at Pg school is (- 0. 84882). The respondents’ overall level of service quality shows that the median gap is (– 0.6942), with a gap of (-1.53) for most students sampled. It means that the level of service encountered during the programme is lower than what learners expected; as a result, there is a low level of satisfaction with the overall service quality provided by the non-teaching staff. The study concludes that alternative providers need to invest more in non-teaching systems and processes. For instance, in the development of personnel at the front desk and management levels, for a better understanding of students’ learning needs and demands. Also, leverage technology for improved and sustained service delivery through investment in critical learning infrastructures. The findings present empirical data for regulators, senior managers, academia, and students; it would be informative and educative for the service providers (university), and service users (Pg students), who demand improved quality in all aspects of the non-teaching service assessed. The study recommends continual review and enhancement to sustain the development process of the core elements; knowledge, skills, and behaviors (KSBs), in the postgraduate learning journey that guarantees a positive experience, in the era of a transition to a greener economy.

Spatial-Temporal Edge User Allocation: An Expectation Confirmation Perspective Approach

As the 5th generation (5G) network develops and rolls out rapidly, user requests can be offloaded to nearby edge servers for processing. This alleviates the pressure on the network backhaul and the remote cloud. Nevertheless, the edge user allocation (EUA) problem, as one of the main research challenges in the 5G era, has become a major obstacle to ensuring users’ Quality of Experience (QoE) in the edge computing environment. Conventional EUA approaches, ranging from static global allocation model to online decision-making model, have ignored the long-term impact of the changes in users’ expectations on user-perceived Quality of Service (QoS). Additionally, most existing approaches have not taken into account the distance between an edge user and an edge server, which impacts the user’s data rate profoundly. In this paper, we tackle these challenges by formulating EUA problem as a spatial-temporal one (ST-EUA), which models distance-aware QoS based on the wireless transmission attenuation and models users’ QoE based on the Expectation Confirmation Theory (ECT). To find an appropriate solution for ST-EUA problem, we develop two fuzzy control-based approaches, namely FC and BFC, for on demand scenarios and batch processing scenarios, respectively. They can balance effectively the user consolidation and server load. We conduct extensive experiments based on two widely-used real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of our FC and BFC in effectiveness and efficiency over the baselines and state-of-the-art.

New QR Survey Methodologies to Analyze User Perception of Service Quality in Public Transport: The Experience of Madrid

Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSS) have become an important tool for public transport planners, as improvements in the perceived quality of service lead to greater use of public transport and lower traffic pollution. Until now, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) enhancements in public transport have traditionally included fleet management systems based on Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) technologies, which can be used to optimize routing and scheduling, and to feed real-time information into passenger information channels. However, surveys of public transport users could also benefit from the new information technologies. As most customers carry their smartphones when traveling, Quick Response (QR) codes open up the possibility of conducting these surveys at a lower cost.This paper contributes to the limited existing literature by developing the analysis of QR codes applied to CSS in public transport and highlighting their importance in reducing the cost of data collection and processing. The added value of this research is that it provides the first assessment of a real case study in Madrid (Spain) using QR codes for this purpose. This pilot experience was part of a research project analyzing bus service quality in the same case study, so the QR code survey (155 valid questionnaires) was validated using a conventional face-to-face survey (520 valid questionnaires). The results show clearly that, after overcoming a few teething troubles, this QR code application will ultimately provide transport management with a useful tool to reduce survey costs.

Correlation Aspects of Strategic Orientations of Internal Marketing of Primary Health Care Institutions

The business efficiency of a service company/institutions is based on recognition and appreciation of user requirements and expectations, as well as reviewing of the user perception of the of offered and provided services at the level of primary health care. Customer expectations in mentioned field regard not only to direct users but also it affects the large number of individuals who are in family and/or emotional relationship with the users. Services from observed domain determine the quality of life of almost all member of the community. Verification of user perception of service quality at the level of primary health care, gives opportunity for harmonization of the working code with user requests and expectations. Examining the degree and direction of quantitative agreement of variations of observed phenomena enables the correction of procedures and additional education of employees, which achieves the adaptation of the primary health care system with user expectations and requirements.. A research approach based on the empirical examination of respondents attitudes, aims to formulate adequate internal marketing strategies on the task of aligning system solutions based on correlation analysis. Modeled menagements solutions have the potential of scientific answer to real problem and to facilitate primary care system providers to reduce the gap between users expectations and the quality of service delivered. The above is effectively achieved by understanding and appreciating the real factors regarding a coordinated approach to users, resulting from a correlative analysis of user observations and expectations, and comparisons of user satisfaction with the form of health care.

Modelling User Perceived Service Quality of Indian Railway Platforms Using Structural Equation Modeling

Modelling User Perceived Service Quality of Indian Railway Platforms Using Structural Equation Modeling

An Online Framework for Joint Network Selection and Service Placement in Mobile Edge Computing

With the rapid development and deployment of 5G wireless technology, mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a new computing paradigm to facilitate a large variety of infrastructures at the network edge to reduce user-perceived communication delay. One of the fundamental problems in this new paradigm is to preserve satisfactory quality-of-service (QoS) for mobile users in light of densely dispersed wireless communication environment and often capacity-constrained MEC nodes. Such user-perceived QoS, typically in terms of the end-to-end delay, is highly vulnerable to both access network bottleneck and communication delay. Previous works have primarily focused on optimizing the communication delay through dynamic service placement, while ignoring the critical effect of access network selection on the access delay. In this work, we study the problem of jointly optimizing the access network selection and service placement for MEC, with the objective of improving the QoS in a cost-efficient manner by judiciously balancing the access delay, communication delay, and service switching cost. Specifically, we propose an efficient online framework to decompose a long-term time-varying optimization problem into a series of one-shot subproblems. To address the NP-hardness of the one-shot problem, we design a computationally-efficient two-phase algorithm based on matching and game theory, which achieves a near-optimal solution. Both rigorous theoretical analysis on the optimality gap and extensive trace-driven simulations are conducted to validate the efficacy of our proposed solution.

An efficient priority-driven congestion control algorithm for data center networks

With the emerging diverse applications in data centers, the demands on quality of service in data centers also become diverse, such as high throughput of elephant flows and low latency of deadline-sensitive flows. However, traditional TCPs are ill-suited to such situations and always result in the inefficiency (e.g. missing the flow deadline, inevitable throughput collapse) of data transfers. This further degrades the user-perceived quality of service (QoS) in data centers. To reduce the flow completion time of mice and deadline-sensitive flows along with promoting the throughput of elephant flows, an efficient and deadline-aware priority-driven congestion control (PCC) protocol, which grants mice and deadline-sensitive flows the highest priority, is proposed in this paper. Specifically, PCC computes the priority of different flows according to the size of transmitted data, the remaining data volume, and the flows' deadline. Then PCC adjusts the congestion window according to the flow priority and the degree of network congestion. Furthermore, switches in data centers control the input/output of packets based on the flow priority and the queue length. Different from existing TCPs, to speed up the data transfers of mice and deadline-sensitive flows, PCC provides an effective method to compute and encode the flow priority explicitly. According to the flow priority, switches can manage packets efficiently and ensure the data transfers of high priority flows through a weighted priority scheduling with minor modification. The experimental results prove that PCC can improve the data transfer performance of mice and deadline-sensitive flows while guaranting the throughput of elephant flows.

Receiver-Assisted Partial-Reliable Multimedia Multipathing Over Multi-Homed Wireless Networks

With the advancement of multimedia technologies and driven by the ever-increasing user interests in the variety of multimedia applications, the content-rich multimedia streaming services tend to be the most attractive service in future Internet. The multipath TCP (MPTCP), which uses multiple paths for parallel transmission and bandwidth aggregation, is considered to be the most potential transfer mechanism to satisfy the specific requirements of multimedia transmission in a multi-homed wireless network environment. However, the fully-reliable transmission nature of MPTCP can cause an unnecessary retransmission of expired multimedia data, block message from handing over to upper layer, and thus degrade the user-perceived multimedia service quality. In this paper, we propose a receiver-centric partial-reliable multipath transport solution (referred to as $rec$ PR-MPTCP) to support real-time Internet multimedia applications. In the $rec$ PR-MPTCP, a partial reliability extension is presented which runs at receiver side in order to offer a partial reliability multipathing service for multimedia applications. In addition, a new one-way delay-based bandwidth aggregation method is included into the $rec$ PR-MPTCP in order to reduce the receive buffer blocking problem in MPTCP and increase multimedia services performance. Simulation results show that $rec$ PR-MPTCP outperforms the current MPTCP solutions in terms of throughput performance and user-perceived quality of service.

Self-Organized Cell Outage Detection Architecture and Approach for 5G H-CRAN

An attractive architecture called heterogeneous cloud radio access networks (H-CRAN) becomes one of the important components of 5G networks, which can provide ubiquitous high-bandwidth services with flexible network construction. However, massive access nodes increase the risk of cell outages, leading to negative impact on user-perceived QoS (Quality of Service) and QoE (Quality of Experience). Thus, cell outage management (COM) became a key function proposed in SON (Self-Organized Networks) use cases. Based on COM, cell outage detection (COD) will be resolved before cell outage compensation (COC). Currently few studies concentrate on COD for 5G H-CRAN, and we propose self-organized COD architecture and approach for it. We firstly summarize current COD solutions for LTE/LTE-A HetNets and then introduce self-organized architecture and approach suitable for H-CRAN, which includes COD architecture and procedures, and corresponding key technologies for it. Based on the architecture, we take a use case with handover data analysis using modified LOF (Local Outlier Factor) detection approach to detect outage for different kinds of cells in H-CRAN. Results show that the proposed approach can identify the outage cell effectively.

QoE-Driven Cross-Layer Downlink Scheduling for Heterogeneous Traffics Over 4G Networks

With the soaring demands for high speed data communication, as well as transmission of various types of services with different requirements over cellular networks, having a decent radio resource management is considered vital in Long Term Evolution (LTE) system. In particular, satisfying the quality of service (QoS) requirements of different applications is one of the key challenges of radio resource management that needs to be dealt by the LTE system. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer design scheme that jointly optimizes three different layers of wireless protocol stack, namely application, Medium Access Control, and physical layer. The cross-layer optimization framework provides efficient allocation of wireless resources across different types of applications (i.e., real-time and non real-time) run by different users to maximize network resource utilization and user-perceived QoS, or also known as Quality of Experience (QoE). Here, Mean Opinion Score is used as a unified QoE metric that indicates the user-perceived quality for real-time or multimedia services notably video applications. Along with multimedia services, the proposed framework also takes care of non-real-time traffic by ensuring certain level of fairness. Our simulation, applied to scenarios where users simultaneously run different types of applications, confirms that the proposed QoE-oriented cross-layer framework leads to significant improvement in terms of maximizing user-perceived quality as well as maintaining fairness among users.

Measuring Perceptual (In) Congruence between Information Service Providers and Users

Library quality is no longer evaluated solely on the value of its collections, as user perceptions of service quality play an increasingly important role in defining overall library value. This paper presents a retooling of the LibQUAL+ survey instrument, blending the gap measurement model with perceptual congruence model studies from information systems management research. The new survey instrument redefines service desk assessment by taking into consideration the perspectives of both service users and of service providers, to help service providers gain a more robust sense of service quality.

Measuring Perceptual (In) Congruence between Information Service Providers and Users

Library quality is no longer evaluated solely on the value of its collections, as user perceptions of service quality play an increasingly important role in defining overall library value. This paper presents a retooling of the LibQUAL+ survey instrument, blending the gap measurement model with perceptual congruence model studies from information systems management research. The new survey instrument redefines service desk assessment by taking into consideration the perspectives of both service users and of service providers, to help service providers gain a more robust sense of service quality.

Cloudlet dynamic server selection policy for mobile task off-loading in mobile cloud computing using soft computing techniques

Wide acceptance of mobile phones and their resource hungry applications have highlighted resource limitations of mobile devices. In this regard, cloud computing has provided mobile phones with unlimited resources in order to help them overcome their constraints and enable them to support wider range of applications; so, mobile devices can outsource their tasks to public or local clouds. To accommodate to exponential growth of requests, user requests should be distributed to different cloudlets and then transparently and dynamically redirected to the servers according to the latest network and server status. Therefore, finding the best place to off-load is vital and crucial to both functionality and performance of the system. However, accurate and timely parameters of network and servers’ status are improbable to achieve, so the traditional algorithms cannot perform effectively and fully efficient. As a solution in this paper, an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system is proposed and trained to assign tasks to the servers efficiently. The trained system is robust to imprecise context information and is tolerable measurement noise and errors. We have considered improving both system performance and user quality of service parameters in this paper. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with other server selection schemes, the proposed scheme can achieve higher resource utilization (utilization is a percentage of time that a server is busy doing something), provide better user-perceived quality of service, and efficiently deal with network dynamics. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm excels over the compared works in terms of performance, at the best case about 30% and at the worst case about 8.93%.

QoS-Oriented Mode, Spectrum, and Power Allocation for D2D Communication Underlaying LTE-A Network

This paper investigates the problem of resource allocation for device-to-device (D2D) communication in a Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) network. The users in the network can operate either in a traditional cellular mode, communicating with each other via the evolved NodeB (eNB), or in a D2D mode, communicating with each other without traversing the eNB. In the considered model, the D2D users and cellular users share the same radio resources. Particularly, each resource block (RB) within the available bandwidth can be occupied by one cellular and several D2D users. Hence, the problem of interference management is crucial for effective performance of such a network. The twofold aim of the proposed algorithm is to 1) mitigate the interference between cellular and D2D users and 2) improve the overall user-perceived quality of service (QoS). To control the interference, for each user, we define a certain target interference level and constrain the interference from the other users to stay below this level. The corresponding optimization problem maximizes the QoS of the users by minimizing the size of the buffers of user equipments (UEs). The performance of the algorithm has been evaluated by using the OPNET-based simulations. The algorithm shows improved performance in terms of mean packet end-to-end delay and loss for UEs when compared to other relevant schemes.

Supporting Quality of Experience based on Service Level Agreement for Heterogeneous Networks

In this paper we propose a novel QoE control scheme based on Service Level Agreement (SLA) which enables to guarantee the user perceived service quality of various high-quality mobile multimedia services such as mobile video streaming and real-time network games to a certain level. For this purpose, a SLA control structure is adopted to provision QoE, and a novel resource management scheme gets coupled with this control structure. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can decrease the average delay and increase the total throughput by adjusting SLA.

Mobile Small Cells for Further Enhanced 5G Heterogeneous Networks

A heterogeneous network (HetNet) is a network topology composed by deploying multiple HetNets under the coverage of macro cells (MCs). It can improve network throughput, extend cell coverage, and offload network traffic; for example, the network traffic of a 5G mobile communications network. A HetNet involves a mix of radio technologies and various cell types working together seamlessly. In a HetNet, coordination between MCs and small cells (SCs) has a positive impact on the performance of the networks contained within, and consequently on the overall user experience. Therefore, to improve user-perceived service quality, HetNets require high-efficiency network protocols and enhanced radio technologies. In this paper, we introduce a 5G HetNet comprised of MCs and both fixed and mobile SCs (mSCs). The featured mSCs can be mounted on a car, bus, or train and have different characteristics to fixed SCs (fSCs). In this paper, we address the technical challenges related to mSCs. In addition, we analyze the network performance under two HetNet scenarios — MCs and fSCs, and MCs and mSCs.

Dynamic rate adaptation for adaptive video streaming in wireless networks

In this paper, we investigate the streaming strategy for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (DASH). Specifically, we focus on the rate adaptation algorithm for streaming scalable video (H.264/SVC) in wireless networks. We model the rate adaptation problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), aiming to find an optimal streaming strategy in terms of user-perceived quality of services (QoS) such as playback interruption, average playback quality and playback smoothness. We then obtain the optimal MDP solution using dynamic programming. However, the optimal solution requires the knowledge of the available bandwidth statistics and has a large number of states, which makes it difficult to obtain the optimal solution in real time. Therefore, we further propose an online algorithm which integrates the learning and planning process. The proposed online algorithm collects bandwidth statistics and makes streaming decisions in real time. A reward parameter has been defined in our proposed streaming strategy, which can be adjusted to make a good trade-off between the average playback quality and playback smoothness. We also use a simple testbed to validate our proposed algorithm. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed algorithm and its advantage over the existing work.

Context-Aware Uplink Resource Allocation Using Request Header Information for ertPS Services in IEEE 802.16e Networks

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective way to improve the quality of service (QoS) of uplink resource allocation for the extended-real-time polling service (ertPS) in IEEE 802.16e broadband wireless networks. The primitive ertPS algorithm determines the amount of resources allocated to a given subscriber station only according to the requested volume in current polling cycles regardless of the knowledge of demand trend. This trend is continuously increasing or declining, which may be incomplete to truly reflect reasonable resource allocation for subscriber stations in different demand tendencies. To cope with this problem, we developed a context-aware ertPS algorithm which gathers statistics on the numbers of request headers of medium access control layer management messages among various subscriber stations, and thus uses the statistical information to enable a dynamic allocation of additional uplink resources to subscriber stations with continuously increasing bandwidth demands. The simulation results show that in comparison with the original ertPS algorithm, the proposed context-aware resource allocation scheme is effective to increase the data throughput as well as to decrease the packet loss rate and packet delay so that the user-perceived QoS can be improved.

Resource allocation for LTE-based cognitive radio network with queue stability and interference constraints

We consider the problem of interference management and resource allocation in a cognitive radio network (CRNs) where the licensed spectrum holders (primary users) share their spare capacity with the non-licensed spectrum holders (secondary users). Under such shared spectrum usage the transmissions of the secondary users should have a minimal impact on the quality of service (QoS) and the operating conditions of the primary users. Therefore, it is important to distinguish the two types of users, and formulate the problem of resource allocation considering hard restrictions on the user-perceived QoS (such as packet end-to-end delay and loss) and physical-layer channel characteristics (such as noise and interference) of the primary users. To achieve this goal, we propose to assign the bandwidth and transmission power to minimize the total buffer occupancy in the system subject to capacity constraints, queue stability constraints, and interference requirements of the primary users. We apply this approach for resource allocation in a CRN built upon a Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) long-term evolution (LTE) standard platform. Performance of the algorithm is evaluated using simulations in OPNET environment. The algorithm shows consistent performance improvement when compared with other relevant resource allocation techniques.