R. Brennan, J. Fleck II, and S. van der Meer (Eds.): MACE 2010, LNCS 6473, pp. 24–36, 2010. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 The Design of a Quality of Experience Model for Providing High Quality Multimedia Services Arum Kwon 1 , Joon-Myung Kang 1 , Sin-seok Seo 1 , Sung-Su Kim 1 , Jae Yoon Chung 1 , John Strassner 2 , and James Won-Ki Hong 2 1 Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering 2 Division of IT Convergence Engineering Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Korea {arumk,eliot,sesise,kiss,dejavu94,johns,jwkhong}@postech.ac.kr Abstract. In the last decade, networks have evolved from simple data packet forwarding to platforms that support complex multimedia services, such as net- work-based personal video recording and broadcast TV. Each of these services has significant quality demands: they are very sensitive to packet loss and jitter, and require a substantial amount of bandwidth. As the quality perceived by the end user gives the most accurate view on the streamed service quality, operators are increasing their focus on this type of metric, commonly described as Quality of Experience. This paper presents the design of a Quality of Experience infor- mation model that defines important metrics for measuring service quality. Based on these metrics, we define a novel control loop that represents the rela- tionships among Quality of Experience, the Customer, and network services. Keywords: Quality of Experience, Multimedia Service, Information Modeling. 1 Introduction The Internet is now supporting advanced multimedia services such as Internet Proto- col Television (IPTV), Video on Demand (VoD), and Voice over IP (VoIP). In addi- tion, network convergence encourages network architecture designs that support different types of network services in a single network. However, such services re- quire high bandwidth and strict service performance due to transferring real-time video and voice data. Furthermore, the concept of Quality of Experience (QoE), which represents a subjective measure of a customer’s experiences for services, is attracting more formalized and growing attention [1]. In this paper, we propose a QoE model for managing the quality of multimedia ser- vices perceived by customers. This model defines appropriate QoE metrics and their relationship with performance indicators and consumers, and is based on the DEN-ng information model [2]. We also present a control loop to optimize the quality of ser- vices based on the measured QoE among networks, end-users and service providers. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes perform- ance indicators for QoE, the DEN-ng information model and previous work on QoE modeling as related work. Section 3 presents our proposed QoE model with a control loop. Finally, conclusions are drawn and future work is discussed in Section 4.