Impact of Variances on the QoE in Video Streaming
Christian Moldovan, Tobias Hoßfeld · 2016
In the current Internet video streaming is dominating fixed and mobile consumer traffic. However, wireless and mobile networks may lack bandwidth or suffer from severe bandwidth fluctuations. The question arises: What is the impact of bandwidth fluctuations on the Quality of Service (QoS) and the user perceived quality? The key contribution of this paper is the analysis of QoS in terms of application-level parameters (stalling duration and frequency) for reliable video-on-demand streaming. The QoS is mapped to Quality of Experience (QoE) based on an existing QoS-QoE model for HTTP streaming. Different network conditions, in particular average and variances of network bandwidths, and video bit rates are taken into account in the analysis. We approach this problem by modeling the video player as a queueing system and evaluate the transient phase of the non-stationary system by means of discrete-event simulations. The results of our study show that the characteristics of the network have a high impact on the QoS and a surprisingly low impact on the QoE under certain conditions.