Prediction of quality of experience for video streaming using raw QoS parameters

Along with the rapid growth in consumer adoption of modern portable devices, video streaming is expected to dominate a large share of the global Internet traffic in the near future. Today user experience is becoming a reliable indicator for video service providers and telecommunication operators to convey overall end-to-end system functioning. Towards this, there is a profound need for an efficient Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring and prediction. QoE is a subjective metric, which deals with user perception and can vary due to the user expectation and context. However, available QoE measurement techniques that adopt a full reference method are impractical in real-time transmission since they require the original video sequence to be available at the receiver’s end. QoE prediction, however, requires a firm understanding of those Quality of Service (QoS) factors that are the most influential on QoE. The main aim of this thesis work is the development of novel and efficient models for video quality prediction in a non-intrusive way and to demonstrate their application in QoE-enabled optimisation schemes for video delivery. In this thesis, the correlation between QoS and QoE is utilized to objectively estimate the QoE. For this, both objective and subjective methods were used to create datasets that represent the correlation between QoS parameters and measured QoE. Firstly, the impact of selected QoS parameters from both encoding and network levels on video QoE is investigated. The obtained QoS/QoE correlation is backed by thorough statistical analysis. Secondly, the development of two novel hybrid non-reference models for predicting video quality using fuzzy logic inference systems (FIS) as a learning-based technique. Finally, attention was move onto demonstrating two applications of the developed FIS prediction model to show how QoE is used to optimise video delivery.