Advancing WebRTC QoE Assessment with Machine Learning in Real-World Wi-Fi Scenarios

Video conferencing applications play a key role in enabling use cases like remote working, education, and potentially the metaverse. From the perspective of Internet service providers, predicting the end user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) in such applications is critical in allocating the right resources to ensure consistently high QoE. This work addresses the estimation of user QoE from link-layer performance metrics such as transferred packets, queue size, signal strength, and channel occupancy for WebRTC-supported applications. Our study entails collecting a data set capturing various Wi-Fi scenarios in practical environments and training machine learning models on this data to estimate the perceived QoE. Our findings demonstrate improvement in prediction accuracy compared to earlier models and QoE representations; furthermore, we also investigate the explainability of the models with the help of SHAP values.