A Multi-level QoE Framework for Smartphone Video Streaming Applications

In recent years, the growth and success of video streaming applications (Apps) have dominated global Internet traffic accompanied by a number of quality of experience (QoE) issues. The purpose of this study is to improve the QoE of video streaming apps by constructing a multi-level framework, which contains 1) two-level quality of system (QoS) metrics: network quality of service (NQoS) and application quality of service (AQoS) as well as 2) two-level QoE metrics: user cognition quality of experience (CQoE) and user behavior quality of experience (BQoE). We first identified and selected QoS metrics through Kano model analysis, and then conducted a user experiment to collect users QoE under various QoS settings. Eventually, a utility function was proposed to describe a generic quantitative relationship between QoE and QoS. The contribution of this framework is to assist video streaming Apps researchers and streaming service operators to identify relationship between QoS and QoE. The proposed approach not only allows streaming system developers and operators to enhance their system designs performance, but provides valuable helps in effectively making decisions between multiple trade-off situations (ex. cost-performance trade-off) in the product or service development phase. Moreover, the respective prediction error of the proposed approach and traditional approach were compared. The results showed our approach outperformed the traditional one in the significant minimization of the prediction error. The practical and theoretical implications were also introduced.