Quality of Experience Measurements for Video Streaming over Wireless Networks

As wireless networks have been increasingly deployed, the need of quality measurement became essential since network operators want to control their network resources while maintaining user satisfaction. More importantly, measurement of technical parameters fails to give an account of the user experience, what could be named QoE (Quality of Experience). Therefore, many techniques have been developed in order to assess as accurately as possible this perceptual quality. To investigate QoE measurement, this paper presents three approaches namely subjective approach, objective approach, and hybrid approach. It also presents performance evaluation of these approaches for assessing QoE in video streaming application over wireless networks in different network conditions (using variation of loss rate and its distribution). We focus more specifically on a hybrid approach called Pseudo Subjective Quality Assessment (PSQA) that keeps advantages of both subjective and objective schemes while minimizing their drawbacks. We demonstrate that this approach provides good estimations comparing to the well-known objective metric called Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). We also observe that PSQA gives similar result comparing to subjective test that has been evaluated by human observers in most of the cases. Moreover, one objective of this evaluation is to validate PSQA for QoE measurement, which will facilitate the use of QoE as metric for resource management in the future. For that, we also give some possible directions allowing us to manage network resources using this metric.