Value Creation in a QoE Environment

User behavior of multimedia services currently undergoes strong changes. This is reflected in several recent trends, e.g. the increase of rich media content consumption, preferences for more individual and personalized services and the higher sensitivity of end users for quality issues. These changes will eventually lead to strong changes in network traffic characteristics: rising congestion in peak times and less availability of bandwidth for the individual user. As a result, the quality as perceived by the end-user will decrease if network operators and service providers do not anticipate the required changes for the network. Measurable network requirements such as available video and speech quality, security and reliability are addressed by technologies that are commonly summed up in the Quality of Service (QoS) concept. However, the end-users' perception of quality is only reflected in the wider concept of Quality of Experience (QoE). This takes the measurable network requirements into account as well as customer needs, wants and preferences. For the implementation of QoE technologies several network components need to be added or changed resulting in high capital expenditures. Yet, it is not clear if these costs can be compensated with efficiency increases. Thus, new revenue streams for the network operator are necessary to incentivize investments in QoE technologies. In this paper we address four new value creation models that can serve as basis for more elaborated business models for network operators and other actors. We show how interest in QoE of the user, the content provider, the service provider and the advertiser induces new revenue streams. These models are embedded in five possible future QoE scenarios that reveal regulation, end user quality sensibility and end-to-end support as major issues for the future. --Business Models,Quality of Experience (QoE),Quality of Service (QoS),Value Creation

Service level Indication: A proposal for QoS monitoring in SLA -based multidomain networks

The offering of QoS based communication services has to face several challenges. Among these, the provisioning of an open and formalised framework for the collection and interchange of monitoring and performance data is feit as one of the most important issues to be solved. Indeed, this is true in seenarios where multiple providers are teaming (intentionally or not) for the construction of a complex service to be sold to a final user, like in the case of the creation of a virtual private network spanning multiple network Operators and infrastructures. In this case, failures in providing certain required Ievels in the quality parameters should be dealt with an immediate attribution of responsibility across the different entities involved in the end-to-end provisioning of the service. But also in cases apparently much simpler, for example when an user requires a video strearning service across a single operator network infrastructure, there is a demand for mechanisms for the measurement of the received quality of service across all the elements involved in the service provisioning: the server system, the network infrastructure, the dient terminal and the user application. lt is clear that this is a complex problem, involving different technologies, disciplines and research areas. In this paper, starting from the ongoing work in the definition of standard interfaces for the Quality of Service negotiation (Service Level Agreements) and control (Service Level Specifications), as weil as from the work ongoing in the IPFIX and IPPM working groups from the IETF, we introduce a new document specifically for delivering monitoring information to user applications. We called such a document Service Level Indication. We here aim at sketching a possible starting point for a research discussion. © 2003 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht