Proposed Framework for Evaluating Quality of Experience in a Mobile, Testbed-oriented Living Lab Setting

• Published in: Mobile networks and applications 2010-06, Vol.15 (3), p.378-391
• Main Authors: De Moor, Katrien, Ketyko, Istvan, Joseph, Wout, Deryckere, Tom, De Marez, Lieven, Martens, Luc, Verleye, Gino
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Communications Engineering; Computer Communication Networks; Electrical Engineering; Engineering; Innovations; IT in Business; Mobile communications networks; Networks; Quality of service; Studies; User experience; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 1383-469X; 1572-8153
• DOI: 10.1007/s11036-010-0223-0

The framework presented in this paper enables the evaluation of Quality of Experience (QoE) in a mobile, testbed-oriented Living Lab setting. As a result, it fits within the shift towards more user-centric approaches in innovation research and aims to bridge the gap between technical parameters and human experience factors. In view of this, Quality of Experience is seen as a multi-dimensional concept, which should be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective. Although several approaches for evaluating perceived QoE have been proposed in the past, they tend to focus on a limited number of objective dimensions and fail to grasp the subjective counterparts of users’ experiences. We therefore propose a distributed architecture for monitoring network Quality of Service (QoS), context information and subjective user experience based on the functional requirements related to real-time experience measurements in real-life settings. This approach allows us to evaluate all relevant QoE-dimensions in a mobile context.