Boxing experience: Measuring QoS and QoE of multimedia streaming using NS3, LXC and VLC

Quality of Experience (QoE) is defined as the overall acceptability of an application or service, as perceived subjectively by the end user including the complete end-to-end system effects. That means QoE may be influenced by the user expectations and context, adding a subjective component to measurements. Nevertheless, it has been studied that some metrics of Quality of Service (QoS), more related to the application and thus closer to the user' side, can be correlated with users evaluations for multimedia transmissions. In this article, we build a modular framework to study the relation between QoS and QoE metrics for multimedia transmissions following the same separation of concerns as the Internet protocol suite. This framework, called BoxingExperience, relies on open-source softwares (NS3 and VLC) and Linux containers. We tested our framework in the context of video streaming from a network camera to several clients. Our simulations show that BoxingExperience can easily simulate, on a typical desktop computer, a scenario where multiple clients are connected to one streaming server.