On quality of experience (QoE) for multimedia services in communication ecosystem
Today, the fulfillment of customer demands and user experience requirements are becoming the main differentiators for gauging the effectiveness of telecom operators and service providers. In this competitive market, the poor Quality of Experience (QoE) leads to a chain reaction of negative word of mouth, pushing customers into the arms of waiting competitors. Therefore it is important for service providers to ensure superior quality of experience in order to avoid customer disloyalty and negative reputation. QoE is a fast emerging multi-disciplinary field focused on understanding overall human quality requirements from different angles such as technology, business and context of use. The first and foremost challenge is to understand how different influencing characteristics related to business, technology, and context influence human behavior. In this thesis, initial work addresses this challenge of understanding the influence of disparate domains over QoE. A consolidated QoE interaction model is proposed which links disparate domains (human, business, technology, and context) to understand overall human quality of experience requirements. Then taxonomy is presented for QoE interaction model. Second contribution in this thesis is based on the first and its main objective is to capture and analyze QoE data through user studies. Based on user data, the influence of technological, contextual and business parameters over QoE are evaluated. Different multimedia services were selected for user study such as video streaming service, telephony (VoIP and PSTN), and 3D audio teleconferencing service. Depending upon multimedia service, different aspects were considered during each user study such as types of multimedia service parameters (QoS, content, context), the types of QoE metrics (subjective, objective cognitive or both), human characteristics (age, gender etc), and human roles (user, or customer). These findings help in understanding the link between QoE and other influencing domains. The third contribution is based upon ongoing work of developing QoE based tools for video streaming services. Two QoE based tools for the assessment of multimedia services have been presented in this thesis, their main functions are to capture, analyze and report QoE metrics in real time. These QoE tools are useful for real time measurement of QoE metrics