What is Quality of Experience (QoE)?

Network operators and service providers from the very advent of telecommunications wanted to
know what is the level of service quality which is provided to the end users. This is because that
knowledge can be extremely useful when trying to manage network topology, optimize its capacity
and operating costs, introduce new services or plan investments and expansion of a network.

In general, we can look at the service quality from two very different, but interconnected,
perspectives. On the one side, there is a network whose performances are usually determined with
network related parameters. Nowadays, we are talking about the packet switched multiservice
networks, such as the Internet, that can be evaluated with performance indicators such as network
delay (latency), jitter, packet loss rate, bandwidth, throughput and error rate. Note that it is
common to call these parameters objective parameters because they are measurable and
quantitative. If you look at the pre-QoE era scientific papers, you will find that most authors denoted
the network performances (measured by the objective parameters) as Quality of Service (QoS).

On the other side of the service quality food chain, there stands a user. Ignorant of network
properties and its performances; only asking a satisfactory service quality for a fair price. For most
users, objective parameters are usually unknown terms defined by a scientist and engineers in some
laboratory far, far away. Their only concern is how a service performs on the application level and
they evaluate the service quality through the qualitative subjective parameters such as level of
satisfaction, enjoyment, entertainment, immersion, annoyance, interface quality and design, service
usability and others.

So now we know that the service quality has some objective and subjective properties. Where is the
connection between the two? Well, a user will hardly be satisfied if a network performances (QoS)
are poor. For instance, if the re-buffering of a video is frequent during the streaming session a user
will most certainly be annoyed and unsatisfied. Hence, network operators have to work on achieving
the QoS targets (e.g. packet loss rate must not exceed 0.1%) in order to keep a user satisfied. Yet,
several authors showed that achieving the QoS targets does not necessarily ensure satisfied users.
Something was still missing.

Even through a network and all services are developed for the end users, in the pre-QoE era, a user
was only a bystander. The quality was usually evaluated through QoS prism and even if a user was
included in the process of service quality evaluation, the evaluation itself was almost always done in
the artificial, laboratory environments dictated by different recommendations of the international
organizations. In such highly controlled environments designed specifically to rule out all external
influential factors (such as surrounding noise during voice quality testing), the subjects were more or
less well informed Ginny pigs. They were asked to evaluate a service one or multiple times under
same or different test conditions, sometimes instructed to focus on a specific aspect of a service
quality. Moreover, they found themselves in the unfamiliar environment (laboratory), interacting
with the unknown people and monitored by some eager laboratory assistant. It is understandable to
find that some researchers concluded that the results of this kind of tests cannot give a complete
and accurate insight into the quality of a service from a user standpoint (see paper 1 and paper 2) .
Therefore, it was time for one hard turn toward the user perspective of service quality and away
from mere QoS evaluation. A new concept was developed – Quality of Experience (QoE). First of all,
let us browse through some QoE definitions: