Quality of Experience on Smartphones: Network, Application, and Energy Perspectives

For service and mobile operators, it is important to monitor and keep high user engagement levels. Quality of Experience (QoE) on video streaming applications is an important engagement measure for video consumer customers. In this paper, video QoE (with the focus on stalling events) is studied from network, application, and energy perspectives with various instrumentations on a smartphone. This enables the understanding of inter-relation between the perspectives and also how they influence the video QoE. Results show that packet delay variation and the maximal burst size in the network level; interpicture times in the application layer; and also fluctuations in the energy consumptions are strong indicators for QoE. Enabled by extensive QoE experiments and energy measurements on smartphones, we obtain a set of telling QoE models capturing the impact of jitter and freezes, and quantifying the insights that energy consumption can be both reduced or increased in the case of stalling events during a video stream.