Quality of Experience Engineering for Customer Added Value Services: From Evaluation to Monitoring

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Measuring MPEG Frame Loss Rate to Evaluate the Quality of Experience in IPTV Services

Diego HERNANDO-LOEDA, Jorge E. LÓPEZ DE VERGARA, Javier ARACIL,David MADRIGAL and Felipe MATA

Current network services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or IP Television pose new challenges to network providers. Network operators need to know if their services are being provided properly. However, current Quality of Service (QoS) parameters commonly used in data networks (e.g. throughput, packet delays and packet losses) do not show a clear view of what the users are experiencing. Thus, it is necessary to translate such measured quality parameters into a QoE value.

Several models are being developed to cope with this problem. For instance, some approaches have used the packet loss rate (PLR) to evaluate the experienced quality of an IP television (IPTV) channel. Unfortunately, packet loss just explains a fraction of the quality behavior. Thus, we go one step further, taking into account the different MPEG frame types that are transmitted.

In this chapter, we define a model to predict the experienced quality that is a function of the loss of the different types of MPEG frames, providing a mean opinion score of the delivered service. The final results show that our model is able to better predict the QoE of such video services than when only using the PLR. We have also implemented this model in a network monitoring tool, which has been validated in both Intel and Advanced RISC Machines ...