USER CENTRIC ASSESSMENT OF MOBILE CONTENTS DELIVERY Florence Agboma 1 , Antonio Liotta 1 Abstract New services like television programs and Video on Demand can be streamed from the Internet to mobile terminals. The question is – how do users perceive such services on mobile terminals? The objective of this study is to determine minimum thresholds across many different content types at which quality becomes unacceptable for users. 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 networks 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. 1. Introduction With the growth of multimedia services coupled with mobility, QoS is commonly used to represent the capability of a network to provide guarantees to selected network traffic. QoS considers parameters of a network that can be easily measured. However, a crucial measure of a network and the services it provides depends on how end users perceive the performance of the application. Quality of Experience is the term used to describe user perception of quality. Fulfilling all QoS parameters might not guarantee a satisfied user thus we need to understand QoE in order to use QoS effectively. This study focuses on user’s perception of quality. Content providers and network operators are providing new services like mobile television and Video on Demand (VoD) for mobile terminals. End-to-end transmission of these services can be summarized under three sources of impairment namely, application level parameters, network conditions and terminal capability. The QoE for a user watching a news clip on a PDA might differ from another user watching that same news clip on a 3G mobile phone. This is because mobile terminals come in different display screens, bandwidth capabilities, frame rates, codecs and processing power. It is essential to provide such services to match the majority of user’s perception of quality for mobile terminals. The determination of these thresholds of acceptability across content types can enable efficient use of network resources and also aid service providers in implementing suitable charging schemes for 1 Department of Electronic System Engineering, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester. United Kingdom. Email: {fagbom | aliotta}@essex.ac.uk 121 Proceedings of MoMM2006