Crowd-sourcing framework to assess QoE

The quality assessment of multimedia services as perceived by the end-user is a challenging task. In a controlled environment, it is easy to measure the user´s Quality of Experience (QoE) against the influence of controlled network parameters. However, in an uncontrolled environment, it is difficult to measure the Quality of Service (QoS) perceived by end-users, due to the unpredictable behaviour of networks. Crowd-sourcing is an emerging technique that can be employed to measure the QoE at the end user, but in an uncontrolled environment. In this paper, we present a tool implementing a crowd-sourcing framework, that measures the QoE of online video streaming, as perceived by end-users. The tool also measures important QoS network parameters in real-time (packet loss, delay, jitter and throughput), retrieves system information (memory, processing power etc.), and other properties of the end-user´s system. The proposed approach provides the opportunity to explore the user´s quality perception in a wider domain.