QoE-aware Multimedia Service Management and Monitoring through OTT and ISP Collaboration

Internet traffic is emerging as multimedia traffic nowadays because of the rising popularity of the Over-The-Top services (OTTS) which includes YouTube, Netflix, Facebook etc.. The drastically rising trend in the multimedia consumption over Internet by the end users combined with the competitive market and quality sensitive users require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and OTTs to incorporate user perception in the multimedia service delivery chain. Necessarily, this will not only require the novel techniques for the network/application service monitoring and management but a collaborative network and application monitoring and management. Quality of Experience (QoE) is gaining researchers interest in multimedia service management and monitoring because of multidimensional aspects and being more user-centric. Thus, in order to incorporate user's perception in the multimedia monitoring and management, the inclusion of the QoE in multimedia service monitoring and management remains significant. As the OTT and ISP have different roles in multimedia service delivery, the work in this thesis focuses on collaborative QoE monitoring and management of multimedia services. The work in the thesis is composed of two parts: I) QoE Monitoring- state-of-the-art monitoring techniques, future challenges and opportunities regarding QoE monitoring are highlighted. Moreover, user terminal based multilayered QoE monitoring solutions are also proposed; II) QoE Management- collaborative QoE management strategies and reference architecture to drive these collaborative management solutions are proposed and evaluated. Moreover, the implementation of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based collaborative QoE management platform built during the doctoral course is also discussed. The results of the collaborative QoE monitoring and management highlights the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies.