Quality of Experience (QoE) in the smart cities context: An initial analysis

During recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the potential opportunities that can be attained with promoting Smart Cities; a concept that can be reached based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The Smart Cities concept is considered achievable by horizontal integration of a number of vertical industries in order to empower sustainability and improvements on quality of life for citizens. At the same time, it is worth noting that within the existing Smart Cities experiments, the offered services are user-centric and ensuring only required Quality of Service (QoS), which is not enough. Then, the challenge here is to evaluate, design and standardize new solutions oriented not only to ensure high performance with respect to the node mobility and the energy consumption but also to guarantee high levels of Quality of Experience (QoE) perceived by the end-user. This paper intends to provide an initial research on how QoE service provision will impact the development of smart city services. In order to do that, authors aim to identify which Smart City services may be impact and in which way for QoE service provision. Aligned with the same objective, business analysis for QoE service provision is introduced with the intention of identify recurring patterns that could be used in the different Smart City services considered.