Quantification of Quality of Experience for Edge-Based Applications

In future Internet, multi-network services correspond to a new paradigm that intelligence in network control is gradually moved to the edge of the network. As a consequence, the application itself can influence or determine the amount of consumed bandwidth. Thus the user behaviour may change dramatically. This impacts the Quality of Service (QoS) and the Quality of Experience (QoE), a subjective measure from the user perspective of the overall value of the provided service or application. A selfish user or application tries to maximize its own QoE rather than to optimize the network QoS, in contrast to a legacy altruistic user. In this paper we present the IQX hypothesis which assumes an exponential functional relationship between QoE and QoS. This contribution is a first step towards the quantification of the QoE for edge-based applications, where an example of VoIP is taken into account. Starting from a measurement of the Skype application, we show the basic properties of selfish and altruistic user behaviour in accordance to edge-based intelligence. The QoE is quantified in terms of MOS in dependence of the packet loss of the end-to-end connection, whereby Skype’s iLBC voice codec is used exemplarily. It is shown that the IQX hypothesis is verified in this application scenario. Furthermore, selfish user behaviour with replicated sending of voice datagrams is investigated with respect to the obtained QoE of a single user. In addition, the impact of this user behaviour on congestion in the network is outlined by means of simulations.