A Loss-Based Utility Function for Predicting IPTV Quality of Experience over an Overlay Network

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) over broadband networks offers more services and flexibility, such as time-shifted TV and video-on-demand (VoD), than the traditional broadcast TV. Unfortunately, IP offers best effort service and Quality of Service (QoS) is not guaranteed. In order to provide QoS guarantees over the Internet, overlay networks are used. Impairments happening at the network layer such as delays and packet losses significantly affect the quality of the IPTV stream. Hence, a reliable mechanism to monitor the Quality of Experience (QoE) of IPTV users is essential to an IPTV service provider in order to avoid customer churn. It is essential that an IPTV provider be able to monitor the QoE with minimal overhead. Therefore, we propose a utility based QoE monitoring approach based on statistical losses at the application layer. This paper also presents mathematical proofs and simulation results that confirm the suitability and effectiveness of our proposed method.