On predicting video quality expectations of mobile users

Mobile network operators are currently seeking for simple but accurate methods to predict the levels of satisfaction for their customers using the on-line multimedia applications, such as YouTube. Even though the ultimate user demands are known to be influenced by multiple factors, there is one clear trend - people require an increasingly higher quality of mobile video services. To this end, modeling the corresponding quality of experience (QoE) constitutes a non-trivial task and calls for a careful balance between the key underlying aspects, while maintaining the overall complexity as low as possible. This should in turn deliver the much needed usability of the resulting model across many real-world scenarios, and in this work we develop a novel QoE prediction model based on our extensive user experience investigation of the YouTube service. Our proposed solution allows network operators to estimate the degrees of video quality and thus predict the associated mobile user expectations in their deployments. The design principles behind our methodology, its accuracy evaluation, as well as the obtained numerical results are reported in the course of this paper.