NTT Research and Development 2011 Review of Activities

Overview

We have developed a QoE^*1 monitoring agent, which is software that is embedded in the STB^*2 or other user terminal to estimate the quality of service as experienced by customer (QoE) for IPTV^*3. Remote monitoring of QoE data for individual customers from an operation center or other facility allows rapid confirmation of the situation when a customer inquires the audiovisual quality or performance of quality management before a customer complains.

Features

• Represent qualitative customer opinion such as ‘distorted image’ as an objective numerical index
• Because quality is estimated using only packet header information, there is very little computational load and the function can be embedded in the customer terminal
• Highly accurate quality estimation compared to MDI^*4 or other existing techniques is achieved by estimating the number of frames over which packet loss errors extend for different types of video frames
• Planned as a proposal for international standardization in 2011

Application scenarios

• Efficient service operation and management through quality monitoring for individual IPTV users without installation of special quality measuring devices
• Specifically, (1) rapid confirmation of the situation when a customer inquires the audiovisual quality, (2) determining the cause of failures, and (3) improved customer satisfaction through averting silent dissatisfaction

• *1 QoE: Quality of Experience
• *2 STB: Set-Top Box
• *3 IPTV: Internet Protocol TeleVision
• *4 MDI: Media Delivery Index (a measure of quality specified in RFC4445)