The Influence of Content and Device Awareness on QoE for Medical Video Streaming over Small Cells : subjective and objective quality evaluations

There is a significant increase in mobile internet usage resulting in demand for traffic volume, frequency efficiency and energy and cost reduction, for which small cell networks are expected to play a key role. Due to high bandwidth requirement, mobile health applications (m-health) and medical video streaming in particular will benefit from small cell networks in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) enhancements. This paper presents content-aware and device-aware medical Quality of Experience evaluations in terms of subjective (e.g. MOS) and objective (e.g. PSNR and SSIM) quality metrics obtained over small cell networks. Furthermore, we address the following two main research questions: (1) How significant is ultrasound video content type in determining medical QoE? (2) How much of a role does the display device play in medical experts' diagnostic experience? The former is answered through the content classification of ultrasound video sequences based on their spatio-temporal features and validating their significance through medical experts' subjective ratings. The latter is answered by conducting a subjective experiment of the ultrasound video sequences across multiple devices, ranging in screen size and resolution.