Understanding user experience of mobile video: Framework, measurement, and optimization

Since users have become the focus of product/service design in last decade, the term User eXperience (UX) has been frequently used in the field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). Research on UX facilitates a better understanding of the various aspects of the user’s interaction with the product or service. Mobile video, as a new and promising service and research field, has attracted great attention. Due to the significance of UX in the success of mobile video (Jordan, 2002), many researchers have centered on this area, examining users’ expectations, motivations, requirements, and usage context. As a result, many influencing factors have been explored (Buchinger, Kriglstein, Brandt & Hlavacs, 2011; Buchinger, Kriglstein & Hlavacs, 2009). However, a general framework for specific mobile video service is lacking for structuring such a great number of factors. To measure user experience of multimedia services such as mobile video, quality of experience (QoE) has recently become a prominent concept. In contrast to the traditionally used concept quality of service (QoS), QoE not only involves objectively measuring the delivered service but also takes into account user’s needs and desires when using the service, emphasizing the user’s overall acceptability on the service. Many QoE metrics are able to estimate the user perceived quality or acceptability of mobile video, but may be not enough accurate for the overall UX prediction due to the complexity of UX. Only a few frameworks of QoE have addressed more aspects of UX for mobile multimedia applications but need be transformed into practical measures. The challenge of optimizing UX remains adaptations to the resource constrains (e.g., network conditions, mobile device capabilities, and heterogeneous usage contexts) as well as meeting complicated user requirements (e.g., usage purposes and personal preferences). In this chapter, we investigate the existing important UX frameworks, compare their similarities and discuss some important features that fit in the mobile video service. Based on the previous research, we propose a simple UX framework for mobile video application by mapping a variety of influencing factors of UX upon a typical mobile video delivery system. Each component and its factors are explored with comprehensive literature reviews. The proposed framework may benefit in user-centred design of mobile video through taking a complete consideration of UX influences and in improvement of mobile videoservice quality by adjusting the values of certain factors to produce a positive user experience. It may also facilitate relative research in the way of locating important issues to study, clarifying research scopes, and setting up proper study procedures. We then review a great deal of research on UX measurement, including QoE metrics and QoE frameworks of mobile multimedia. Finally, we discuss how to achieve an optimal quality of user experience by focusing on the issues of various aspects of UX of mobile video. In the conclusion, we suggest some open issues for future study

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Enhancing Mobile Capacity through Generic and Efficient Resource Sharing

Mobile computing devices are becoming indispensable in every aspect of human life, but diverse hardware limits make current mobile devices far from ideal for satisfying the performance requirements of modern mobile applications and being used anytime, anywhere. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) could be a viable solution to bypass these limits which enhances the mobile capacity through cooperative resource sharing, but is challenging due to the heterogeneity of mobile devices in both hardware and software aspects. Traditional schemes either restrict to share a specific type of hardware resource within individual applications, which requires tremendous reprogramming efforts; or disregard the runtime execution pattern and transmit too much unnecessary data, resulting in bandwidth and energy waste.To address the aforementioned challenges, we present three novel designs of resource sharing frameworks which utilize the various system resources from a remote or personal cloud to enhance the mobile capacity in a generic and efficient manner. First, we propose a novel method-level offloading methodology to run the mobile computational workload on the remote cloud CPU. Minimized data transmission is achieved during such offloading by identifying and selectively migrating the memory contexts which are necessary to the method execution. Second, we present a systematic framework to maximize the mobile performance of graphics rendering with the remote cloud GPU, during which the redundant pixels across consecutive frames are reused to reduce the transmitted frame data. Last, we propose to exploit the unified mobile OS services and generically interconnect heterogeneous mobile devices towards a personal mobile cloud, which complement and flexibly share mobile peripherals (e.g., sensors, camera) with each other

Device-oriented energy-aware utility-based priority scheduler for video streaming over LTE system

Nowadays people tend to spend most of their time in front of a screen, and expect to be able to connect to the Internet anytime and anywhere and from any type of mobile device. Therefore, fast surfing speed on Internet, high resolution display screen, advanced multi-core processor and lasting battery support are becoming the significant standards in the nowadays mobile devices. In this context the network operators must be able to differentiate between their multiscreen offerings in order to ensure uninterrupted, continuous, and smooth video streaming with minimal delay, jitter, and packet loss. This paper proposes a novel Device-Oriented Energy-Aware Utility-based Priority scheduling (DE-UPS) algorithm which makes use of device differentiation in order to ensure seamless multimedia services over LTE networks. The priority decision is based on the device classification, energy consumption of the mobile device and the multimedia stream tolerance to packet loss ratio

A Survey on Adaptive Multimedia Streaming

Internet was primarily designed for one to one applications like electronic mail, reliable file transfer etc. However, the technological growth in both hardware and software industry have written in unprecedented success story of the growth of Internet and have paved the paths of modern digital evolution. In today’s world, the internet has become the way of life and has penetrated in its every domain. It is nearly impossible to list the applications which make use of internet in this era however, all these applications are data intensive and data may be textual, audio or visual requiring improved techniques to deal with these. Multimedia applications are one of them and have witnessed unprecedented growth in last few years. A predominance of that is by virtue of different video streaming applications in daily life like games, education, entertainment, security etc. Due to the huge demand of multimedia applications, heterogeneity of demands and limited resource availability there is a dire need of adaptive multimedia streaming. This chapter provides the detail discussion over different adaptive multimedia streaming mechanism over peer to peer network

Quality of experience-centric management of adaptive video streaming services : status and challenges

Video streaming applications currently dominate Internet traffic. Particularly, HTTP Adaptive Streaming ( HAS) has emerged as the dominant standard for streaming videos over the best-effort Internet, thanks to its capability of matching the video quality to the available network resources. In HAS, the video client is equipped with a heuristic that dynamically decides the most suitable quality to stream the content, based on information such as the perceived network bandwidth or the video player buffer status. The goal of this heuristic is to optimize the quality as perceived by the user, the so-called Quality of Experience (QoE). Despite the many advantages brought by the adaptive streaming principle, optimizing users' QoE is far from trivial. Current heuristics are still suboptimal when sudden bandwidth drops occur, especially in wireless environments, thus leading to freezes in the video playout, the main factor influencing users' QoE. This issue is aggravated in case of live events, where the player buffer has to be kept as small as possible in order to reduce the playout delay between the user and the live signal. In light of the above, in recent years, several works have been proposed with the aim of extending the classical purely client-based structure of adaptive video streaming, in order to fully optimize users' QoE. In this article, a survey is presented of research works on this topic together with a classification based on where the optimization takes place. This classification goes beyond client-based heuristics to investigate the usage of server-and network-assisted architectures and of new application and transport layer protocols. In addition, we outline the major challenges currently arising in the field of multimedia delivery, which are going to be of extreme relevance in future years

Device characteristics-based differentiated energy-efficient adaptive solution for multimedia delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks

Energy efficiency is a key issue of highest importance to mobile wireless device users, as those devices are powered by batteries with limited power capacity. It is of very high interest to provide device differentiated user centric energy efficient multimedia content delivery based on current application type, energy-oriented device features and user preferences. This thesis presents the following research contributions in the area of energy efficient multimedia delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks: 1. ASP: Energy-oriented Application-based System profiling for mobile devices: This profiling provides services to other contributions in this thesis. By monitoring the running applications and the corresponding power demand on the smart mobile device, a device energy model is obtained. The model is used in conjunction with applications’ power signature to provide device energy constraints posed by running applications. 2. AWERA 3. DEAS: A Device characteristics-based differentiated Energy-efficient Adaptive Solution for video delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks. Based on the energy constraint, DEAS performs energy efficient content delivery adaptation for the current application. Unlike the existing solutions, DEAS takes all the applications running on the system into account and better balances QoS and energy efficiency. 4. EDCAM 5. A comprehensive survey on state-of-the-art energy-efficient network protocols and energy-saving network technologies