Towards QoE monitoring at user terminal: A monitoring approach based on quality degradation

This work is based on the investigation of the passive Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring of Over-The-Top (OTT) applications at the user terminal with the perspective of the Internet Service Provider (ISP). The contribution is multi-fold. Firstly, we investigate the advantages and drawbacks of QoE monitoring at the user terminal by highlighting the roles of the different entities involved in multimedia service delivery, i.e., users, OTTs and ISPs. Secondly, a survey is conducted related to user's privacy and preferences with reference to the installation of monitoring probes at the terminal. The analysis of survey results highlights the applicability of the approach in terms of users' willingness to have probes at their terminals in exchange for higher quality, discounts or extra data usage. Thirdly, we propose a multi-layered passive monitoring approach at the user terminal which considers the activation of the probes only in case quality degradation is revealed (in an event-based fashion), in contrast to conventional passive monitoring solutions whose probes send monitored data to the collection centers on regular intervals basis (constant frequency). As a case study, YouTube is considered as video streaming service in our experiments to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.