Addressing User Expectations in Mobile Content Delivery

Abstract

Multimedia services like television programs and live streaming of mobile videos can be delivered to mobile terminals via different access technologies. The question is – how do users perceive such services on mobile terminals? The objective of this study is to find the correlation between video quality thresholds and the user context. Our study reveals the thresholds of user's quality of experience (QoE) in a mobile environment by using different categories of content types, in relation to different access technologies and terminal capability. The mobile terminals used are: – (i) 3G Mobile Phone (ii) Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and (iii) Laptop. We argue that quality of service (QoS) management should be driven by the user perception of quality rather than resulting from raw engineering parameters such as latency, jitter, bandwidth etc. Our results will be of great interest to network operators, service providers, terminal manufacturers, and researchers working in the area of quality of service management.