Impact of Media-Related SIFs on QoE for H.265/HEVC Video Streaming

Long term evolution (LTE) has distinguished itself compared to other mobile broadband technologies in its ability to handle the growth of video traffic that has become an important part of user's mobile broadband experience. Growing trend of video consumption implies that that media-related system influence factors (SIFs) should be identified and well understood in order to determine how they affect the user's quality of experience (QoE). Therefore, this paper aims to provide a deeper understanding of media-related SIFs and their impact on QoE for video streaming. Experimental study has included two phases, i.e., H.265/ high efficiency video coding (HEVC) coded video streaming emulation over LTE network and end-user survey for collecting mean opinion score (MOS). The original scientific contribution of this study and its results is twofold. For the first time it has been shown that there exists strong and statistically significant impact of media-related SIFs and their interactions on QoE for H.265/HEVC video streaming, and a quantification of relation between QoE and selected media-related SIFs, i.e., prediction model has been provided. The knowledge of these impacts and interactions, as well as prediction model, contributes to increase the awareness of and improvement of video streaming service. This leads to better understanding of end user's QoE and provides a starting point for development of multidimensional QoE model.