QoE Concepts and Standards

FOCUS
- How a user perceives the usability of a service when in use
- How satisfied he or she is with a service
- End-to-end network QoS
- Factors such as network coverage, service offers, level of support, etc.
- Subjective factors such as user expectations, requirements, particular
experience

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) related to

- Reliability
- Comfort

QoE in ITU-T

 The overall acceptability of an application or service, as perceived subjectively by the end

user:

 NOTE 1 – Quality of experience includes the complete end-to-end system effects

(client, terminal, network, services infrastructure, etc.).

 NOTE 2 – Overall acceptability may be influenced by user expectations and

context.

QoE
Objective Subjective

Quality of Human
Service Components

Service Transport Application Emotions Service Experience

Factors Factors Factors Billing

QoE Dimension
QoE in ETSI
QoE is a measure of user performance based on objective and subjective
psychological measures of using a service or product.

- NOTE 1: It takes into account technical parameters (e.g., QoS) and usage
context variables (e.g., communication task), and measures the process and
outcomes of usage (e.g., user effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and
enjoyment)

- NOTE 2: The appropriate psychological measures will be dependent on the

communication context. Objective psychological measures do not rely on the
opinion of the user (e.g., task completion time… task accuracy…) Subjective
psychological measures are based on the opinion of the user.

- The degree of delight of the user of a service

- Influenced by content, network, device, application, user expectations and

goals, and context of use.

The Nature of the Beast

 Subjective or objective?
 Qualitative or quantitative?
 Behavior or numbers?
 User expression or user performance?

To which extent is QoE

 Measurable?
 Context-dependent?
 Content - dependent?
 Expectation-dependent?

Quality of Service (QoS)

 standardization point of view

 QoS = the collective effect of service performance which determine the
degree of satisfaction of a user of the service
 network point of view
 A set of service requirements to be met by the network while
transporting a flow
  Property of the network and its components: refers often to “better-than-
best-effort” packet forwarding

Subjective QoE

 Ask/observe the user  Measures

- Questionnaires - Effectiveness

- Rating scales - Efficiency

- Annotations - Satisfaction

- Non-/verbal methods - Enjoyment

- Etc. - Social presence

- Impression of communication partner

Objective QoE

 Measurements of user activity  Measures

- Accuracy of user task completion
- Gain or loss to user
- Time taken goal completion
- Number of user inputs
- Time between user inputs
- Number of turns taken to communicate
- Number of interruptions
- Number of simultaneous actions

Qualitative QoE

 Descriptive, verbal approach

 MOS scale is an ordinal qualitative scale
 Excellent (5)
 Good (4)
 Fair (3)
 Poor (2)
 Bad (1)
 If you ask for verbal ratings and assign numbers, your statistics might not be
valid
 Quantitative QoE

 Numerical approach
 Use interval or ratio scale (e.g. with values at the edge)
 5
 4
 3
 2
 1
 Eventually easier to process (statistics, comparisons, …)
 Binary scale (yes/no) (1/0)

User Perception of Response Times

Response
100 ms 1s 10 s Time
Boring

React There is
Promptl a delay
y

Generic QoE – QoS Relationship

 area 1: no distortion

5 -- area 2: user disturbed

area 3: user gives up

4 --

1 2
QoE value
3

3 --

2 --

1 --

x1 x2
QoS disturbance

Consequences of QoS Problems?

 Short-term: bad ratings
 Medium-term: aborts
 We have occasionally extended the numerical MOS scale by the level ”0”
for ”abort”
 Long-term: churn

”Happy users surf more”

Conclusion

 QoE is multi-faceted
 Will there ever be a generic definition?
 Fundamentalistic versus pragmatic views
 State
 Your viewpoint
 Which aspect(s) you are referring to
 Try to be as objective and quantitative as feasible