A quality of experience management module

User centric management of multimedia services necessitates understanding of how different system parameters affect the perceived quality of the service. Today’s multimedia delivery systems are highly complex and diverse and span over multiple domains commonly in control of different entities. Furthermore, the end user devices are highly variable in capabilities and characteristics, which directly affect the perceived quality. In addition to these factors the perceived quality in multimedia is subjective by nature, which leads to complexities in accurate estimation with objective methods and costs with subjective estimation. To deal with the necessities of estimation of Quality of Experience (QoE) we have implemented a software module that aggregates information from probes and subjective quality feedback to develop QoE prediction models. These models are then used as part of the QoE management module to estimate the QoE of multimedia delivery streams in real-time. Additionally, the module calculates and suggests QoE remedies (improvements) for multimedia streams that underperform. The remedies are in the form of a single or multiple target parameter values that need to be reached in order for the stream to reach the desired QoE. The functionalities of this module enable an implementation of a user-centric management loop for multimedia services.