Quality of Experience for Streaming Services: Measurements, Challenges and Insights

Abstract

Over the last few years, the evolution of network and user handsets' technologies, have challenged the telecom industry and the Internet ecosystem. Especially, the unprecedented progress of multimedia streaming services like YouTube, Vimeo and DailyMotion resulted in an impressive demand growth and a significant need of Quality of Service (QoS) (e.g., high data rate, low latency/jitter, etc.). Mainly, numerous difficulties are to be considered while delivering a specific service, such as a strict QoS, human-centric features, massive number of devices, heterogeneous devices and networks, and uncontrollable environments. Thenceforth, the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE) is gaining visibility, and tremendous research efforts have been spent on improving and/or delivering reliable and added-value services, at a high user experience. In this paper, we present the importance of QoE in wireless and mobile networks (4G, 5G, and beyond), by providing standard definitions and the most important measurement methods developed. Moreover, we exhibit notable enhancements and controlling approaches proposed by researchers to meet the user expectation in terms of service experience.

Keywords

• Quality of experience (QoE)
• quality of service (QoS)
• QoE measurements
• QoE enhancements
• 4G/5G/B5G
• D2D