Representative service based quality of experience modeling for instant messaging service

Instant Messaging (IM) Service is an integrated service composed by multiple types of subservices, which have diverse performance requirements and evaluation criteria. IM service has drawn a lot of attention, yet a suitable Quality of Experience (QoE) model for IM service can rarely be found. In this paper, we propose a Representative Service (RS) based QoE modeling criterion for IM service. We discover that the QoE of IM service users mainly depends on the Representative Service Quality (RSQ) by exploiting the patterns of the IM service user behaviors. In the proposed RS based QoE model, the Normalized Quality (NQ) is defined for different subservices with various performance evaluation criteria to unify their qualities, and the Attention Factor (AF) is proposed to estimate the subservice that a user is focusing on. By performing a small-scale but illustrative subjective test, we verify the proposed QoE model and indicate the effectiveness of the model in tracing the IM service user behaviors.