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

TL;DR

This paper reviews the importance of Quality of Experience (QoE) in streaming services, discussing measurement methods, challenges, and recent enhancements in wireless and mobile networks like 4G and 5G.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of QoE definitions, measurement techniques, and recent approaches to improve user experience in multimedia streaming over modern networks.

Findings

QoE is critical for user satisfaction in streaming services.

Various measurement methods exist for assessing QoE.

Recent enhancements aim to meet user expectations in 4G and 5G networks.

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 addedvalue 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.