Multimedia Quality of Experience (QoE)

4 Quality of Experience for HTTP Adaptive Streaming Services

Ozgur Oyman, Vishwanath Ramamurthi, Utsaw Kumar, Mohamed Rehan and Rana Morsi

Intel Corporation, USA

4.1 Introduction

With the introduction of smartphones like the iPhone™ and Android™-based platforms, the emergence of new tablets like the iPad™, and the continued growth of netbooks, ultrabooks, and laptops, there is an explosion of powerful mobile devices in the market which are capable of displaying high-quality video content. In addition, these devices are capable of supporting various video-streaming applications, interactive video applications like video conferencing, and can capture video for video-sharing, video-blogging, video-Twitter™, and video-broadcasting applications. Cisco predicts that mobile traffic will grow by a factor of 11 until 2018, and that this traffic will be dominated by video (so, by 2018, over 66% of the world's mobile traffic will be video).¹ As a result, future wireless networks will need to be optimized for the delivery of a range of video content and video-based applications.

Yet, video communication over mobile broadband networks today is challenging due to limitations in bandwidth and difficulties in maintaining the high reliability, quality, and latency demands imposed by rich multimedia applications. Even with the migration from 3G to 4G networks – or Radio Access Networks (RANs) and backhaul upgrades to 3G networks – the demand on capacity for multimedia traffic will continue to ...