Monitoring YouTube QoE: Is Your Mobile Network Delivering the Right Experience to your Customers?

YouTube, the killer application of today's Internet, is changing the way ISPs and network operators manage quality monitoring and provisioning on their IP networks. YouTube is currently the most consumed Internet application, accounting for more than 30% of the overall Internet's traffic worldwide. Coupling such an overwhelming traffic volume with the ever intensifying competition among ISPs is pushing operators to integrate Quality of Experience (QoE) paradigms into their traffic management systems. The need for automatic QoE assessment solutions becomes even more critical in mobile broadband networks, where over-provisioning solutions can not be foreseen and bad user experience translates into churning clients. This paper presents a complete study on the problem of YouTube Quality of Experience monitoring and assessment in mobile networks. The paper considers not only the QoE analysis, modeling and assessment based on real users' experience, but also the passive monitoring of the quality provided by the ISP to its end-customers in a large mobile broadband network.