Measurements and applications of QoE for multimedia communications

With the rapid development of smart devices and mobile networks, multimedia services will dominate most of data traffic in 4G/5G networks. Applications such as conversational videos, online multimedia sharing, remote education, etc. have gained their popularity and will become more ubiquitous among customers. Traditional criteria for evaluating the overall performance of networks are usually summarized in several objective aspects such as error rates, bandwidth, throughput, transmission delay, availability, etc., which are commonly called quality of service (QoS). However, to evaluate the subjective quality of multimedia services, only part of QoS can be involved (e.g., transmission delay), which is not a suitable measure. Quality of experience (QoE), on the other hand, is a subjective measure on the overall performance of network services from user's perspective, which is also called the perceptual QoS from user's perspective.