Computing The Quality of Experience in Network Modeled by a Markov Modulated Fluid Model

We take an analytical approach to study the Quality of user Experience (QoE) for video streaming applications. Our propose is to characterize buffer starvations for streaming video with Long-Range-Dependent (LRD) input traffic. Specifically we develop a new analytical framework to investigate Quality of user Experience (QoE) for streaming by considering a Markov Modulated Fluid Model (MMFM) that accurately approximates the Long Range Dependence (LRD) nature of network traffic. We drive the close-form expressions for calculating the distribution of starvation as well as start-up delay using partial differential equations (PDEs) and solve them using the Laplace Transform. We illustrate the results with the cases of the two-state Markov Modulated Fluid Model that is commonly used in multimedia applications. We compare our analytical model with simulation results using ns-3 under various operating parameters. We further adopt the model to analyze the effect of bitrate switching on the starvation probability and start-up delay. Finally, we apply our analysis results to optimize the objective quality of experience (QoE) of media streaming realizing the tradeoff among different metrics incorporating user preferences on buffering ratio, startup delay and perceived quality.