The QoE provisioning-delivery-hysteresis and its importance for service provisioning in the Future Internet

Quality of Experience (QoE) combines non-technical parameters such as user perception, experience and expectations with technical parameters such as application- and network-level Quality of Service (QoS). For service or network providers, it is important to understand the quantitative relationship between QoE and these technical parameters in order to manage the user-perceived quality. This paper investigates the different impacts of a) provisioning and b) delivery problems due to insufficient resources on QoE, leading to the QoE provisioning-delivery hysteresis (QoE-PDH). We demonstrate the QoE-PDH for Voice-over-IP, live video streaming, and web browsing based on existing measurement studies. The results clearly quantify the necessity to control quality, instead of suffering from uncontrollable impacts like packet loss caused by congestion. The implementation and the limitations of the QoE-PDH in the current Internet is shown using the example of Skype. Afterwards we discuss how these results can be used to enhance energy-efficient service provisioning and delivery in the Future Internet.