Defining Quality of Experience for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) brings a set of unique and complex challenges to the field of Quality of Experience (QoE) evaluation. The state-of-the-art research in QoE mainly targets multimedia services, such as voice, video, and the Web, to determine quality perceived by end-users. Therein, main evaluation metrics involve subjective and objective human factors and network quality factors. Emerging IoT may also include intelligent machines within services, such as health-care, logistics, and manufacturing. The integration of new technologies such as machine-to-machine communications and artificial intelligence within IoT services may lead to service quality degradation caused by machines. In this article, we argue that evaluating QoE in the IoT services should also involve novel metrics for measuring the performance of the machines alongside metrics for end-users' QoE. This article extends the legacy QoE definition in the area of IoT and defines conceptual metrics for evaluating QoE using an industrial IoT case study.