One-to-Many Negotiation QoE Management Mechanism for End-User Satisfaction

Quality of Experience (QoE) is defined as the measure of end-user satisfaction with the service. Most of the existing works addressing QoE-management rely on a
binary
vision of end-user satisfaction. This vision has been criticized by the growing empirical evidence showing that QoE is rather a
degree
. This article aims to go beyond the binary vision and propose a QoE management mechanism. We propose a one-to-many negotiation mechanism allowing the provider to undertake
satisfaction management
: to meet fine-grained user QoE goals, while still minimizing the costs. This problem is formulated as an optimization problem, for which a linear model is proposed. For reference, a generic linear program solver is used to find the optimal solution, and an alternative heuristic algorithm is devised to improve the responsiveness when the system has to scale up with a fast-growing number of users. Both are implemented and experimentally evaluated against state-of-the-art one-to-many negotiation frameworks.