Abstract: Over the past few years there has been an exponential increase in the amount of multimedia data being streamed over the Internet. At the same time, we are also witnessing a change in the way quality of any particular service is interpreted, with more emphasis being given to the end-users. Thus, silently there has been a paradigm shift from the traditional Quality of Service approach (QoS) towards a Quality of Experience (QoE) model while evaluating the service quality. A lot of work that tries to evaluate the quality of audio, video, and multimedia services over the Internet has been done. At the same time, research is also going on trying to map the two different domains of quality metrics, i.e., the QoS and QoE domain. Apart from the work done by individual researchers, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has been quite active in this area of quality assessment. This is obvious from the large number of ITU standards that are available for different application types. The sheer variety of techniques being employed by ITU as well as other researchers sometimes tends to be too complex and diversified. Although there are survey papers that try to present the current state of the art methodologies for video quality evaluation, none has focused on the ITU perspective. In this work, we try to fill up this void by presenting up-to-date information on the different measurement methods that are currently being employed by ITU for a video streaming scenario. We highlight the outline of each method with sufficient detail and try to analyze the challenges being faced along with the direction of future research. PubDate: Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 +000
Abstract: For the OFDM-based Amplify-and-Forward cooperative system, a novel relay-superimposed pilot strategy is proposed, where the source pilot symbols are frequency division multiplexed to estimate the cascaded channel while relay pilot sequence is superimposed onto the top of the cooperative data stream for second-hop channel estimation. This method avoids the loss of data rate for additional pilot subcarriers but results in the interference of unknown cooperative data. To remove the interference of cooperative data during the estimation of second-hop channel, the Cooperative Interference Cancelation scheme assisted by cooperative data from direct link is proposed. We derive the approximated lower bound for the MSE of second-hop channel estimation. Simulation results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed schemes. PubDate: Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +000
Abstract: Quality of Experience (QoE) of video streaming services has been attracting more and more attention recently. Therefore, in this work we designed and implemented a real-time QoE monitoring system for streaming services with Adaptive Media Playout (AMP), which was implemented into the VideoLAN Client (VLC) media player to dynamically adjust the playout rate of videos according to the buffer fullness of the client buffer. The QoE monitoring system reports the QoE of streaming services in real time so that network/content providers can monitor the qualities of their services and resolve troubles immediately whenever their subscribers encounter them. Several experiments including wired and wireless streaming were conducted to show the effectiveness of the implemented AMP and QoE monitoring system. Experimental results demonstrate that AMP significantly improves the QoE of streaming services according to the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) estimated by our developed program. Additionally, some challenging issues in wireless streaming have been easily identified using the developed QoE monitoring system. PubDate: Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +000