Improving Perceived Streaming-Video Quality in High Speed Downlink Packet Access

High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is an enhancement to UMTS networks that supports data rates of several Mbps, making it suitable for applications such as video streaming. Nevertheless, the shared downlink radio channel used in HSDPA is a challenging environment for such applications. In this paper, we focus on the issue of subjective video quality, and design a novel estimator of the user-perceived quality that operates in real time. We propose to integrate such estimator in User Equipments (UEs) so that it can provide regular feedback and help the UMTS resource management procedures. Then, we use it to study the impact of a recently proposed HSDPA scheduler directly on the perceived video quality. HSDPA scheduling is one of the salient points of HSDPA and is used to perform resource management (i.e., bandwidth allocation between terminals), taking into account the radio channel conditions of all users.