Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 20
End-to-End Management of Heterogeneous
Environments Enabling Quality of Experience
Christian Timmerer, Maria Teresa Andrade, and Alberto Leon Martin
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Abstract.
End-to-end support for Quality of Service (QoS) or Quality of Experi-
ence (QoE) has been broadly discussed in the literature. Many technologies have
been proposed, each focusing on specific aspects for providing QoS/QoE guaran-
tees to the end user. However, the integrated management of the end-to-end chain
preserving QoS/QoE in heterogeneous environments is still an aspect insuffi-
ciently addressed to date, regardless the fact that it significantly impacts the
overall quality of the service paid by the end-user. In this chapter we propose an
integrated management supervisor that takes into account the requirements from
all stakeholders along the multimedia content delivery chain. It provides an end-
to-end management solution enabling QoS/QoE to the end user. Furthermore, we
describe a QoS/QoE model which allows one to measure the perceptual quality of
video transmissions by exploiting metrics from different layers (service, applica-
tion and network) in an interoperable way. As such we are able to keep the quality
as experienced by the end user at a satisfactory level, even when facing adverse
delivery conditions, without cost-intensive subjective tests. Therefore, we propose
a detailed QoS/QoE model for video transmission following the philosophy of the
ITU-T's E-model for audio, and show how this can be translated into interoperable
description formats offered by the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework, as a contri-
bution to balance the current network neutrality debate among its key players.
