Quality of Experience in Communications Ecosystem

Communications ecosystem covers a huge area from technical issues to business models and human behaviour. Due to this extreme diversity various societies need to discuss with each other, each of them using their own language. Engineers talk about network performance and quality of service, business people talk about average revenue per user and customer churn while behavioural scientists talk about happiness and experiences. Thus, everyone who wants to understand, or even analyze, the whole ecosystem, has to deal with all these diverse issues. In addition to the apparent communication problems, the main challenges of ecosystem analysis are to realistically model human behaviour, and to efficiently combine the models developed for different domains. A central concept when solving these problems is quality of experience (QoE). This paper sheds light on the role of QoE by means of a common framework that covers the whole communications ecosystem. Additionally, a research agenda for a holistic ecosystem analysis is outlined.