Workshops on Tracking Quality of Experience in the Internet

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award will support the first of two anticipated workshops on tracking Quality of Experience (QoE) in the Internet. The workshops will bring together top researchers in academia and industry, as well as government representatives, to discuss ongoing work on the topic, and opportunities and potential frameworks for collaboration across the different disciplines. The intended outcome is a research agenda leading to better methods to measure and analyze the state of QoE in the current Internet and identify and localize the causes of QoE impairments. Considering the diversity of topics to consider, the organizers will ensure through announcements in a range of venues and targeted email that different research areas and perspectives are adequately represented. The term "Quality of Experience (QoE)" describes a user's subjective assessment of his or her experience using some application. Network engineers have in the past focused on Quality of Service: performance metrics such as throughput, delay and jitter, packet loss, and the like. But different performance as measured by QoS parameters only matters if it affects the consequential experience of users, as they attempt to use one or another application over the net. QoE impairments, which might include rebuffering for streaming video or excessive round trip latency for real time speech, are what really matter to the user. The goal of the workshops is to understand the state of research with respect to QoE, and specifically to contemplate a community agenda to integrate ongoing threads of QoE research into a collaboration, in order to measure and analyze the state of QoE in the current Internet and identify and localize the causes of QoE impairments. These meetings will bring together researchers in different areas critical to understanding QoE in the Internet - from network measurements, to experimental designs and human factors - and provide opportunities for cross-area research and collaboration. The outcome of the workshop will begin to define relevant measurements of broadband quality and help network providers to better understand where impairments are arising in the global Internet. These consequences should in turn lead to a better Internet experience for the typical user of the Internet. As well, the discussions at the workshop are intended to suggest new research collaboration for the network, systems and human computer interaction communities.