Towards evaluating type of service related Quality-of-Experience on mobile networks

Quality of Service (QoS) metrics have been traditionally used to evaluate the perceived quality of services delivered by network operators. However, these metrics are not suitable for evaluating the experience of an end-user. The experience of a user is quantified based upon activities such as speed of web page loading, quality of video streaming, or voice quality of Internet-telephony. Due to the temporal and geographical nature of mobile networks, the perceived experience of a user may change based on location and time. Mobile operators may prioritize certain services over others, leading to a service type dependent Quality of Experience (QoE). In this paper we present a mobile application developed to gather metrics necessary to evaluate QoE in a mobile environment. Our approach towards obtain not just a general, but service specific mean opinion score (MOS) to quantify QoE is also discussed. Initial experiments and measurement tests show that it is possible for the same operator to deliver different QoE based on service and even time-of-day.