Assessment and Modelling of Quality of Experience for user of Mobile Devices

Abstract

Quality of Experience (QoE) in multimedia networking and communication is a wider term that encompasses not only network impairments and video signal quality, but also covers other factors such as the end user devices, service infrastructure, network bandwidth, user expectation and the environment where the end user is communicating or consuming multimedia services. Smart phones and other portable devices such as tablets and game consoles have experienced exponential growth in numbers over the recent years. This tremendous growth has come with a lot challenges, amongst them are power consumption and quality of experience. The challenges in the quality of experience are due to the fact that there are many mobile device types from different manufactures having varying display technologies, size, memory and processors. These varying technologies make assessment, measurements and prediction of quality of experience a challenge for researchers in academia and industrial domain. In this study, mobile device screen size and mobile device user preferences are considered as mobile device context parameters for which their impact on the quality of experience over the video services is investigated. Through subjective tests, the impact of mobile device pixel density on the video quality is evaluated and the new quality of experience model is proposed that takes pixel density into consideration. The proposed quality model is validated through unseen video sequences, and the results have shown that the proposed model performs well regarding correlation coefficient. This study, through subjective tests, has also conducted an investigation on the impact of mobile device preferences on the quality of experience for video services. Based on this investigation, the experimental results has shown that quality of experience is highly correlated with user preferences on mobile devices. The new proposed quality of experience model and the findings on the impact of mobile device user preferences on the quality of experience have potential use for multimedia service providers such as YouTube, Facebook and Netflix in areas of quality control and optimization of network and multimedia services.