Collaborative Approach Using Psychophysiology and Psychophysics for Optimal Threshold Determination in HAS Service QoE Management

Abstract

In HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) services, Quality of Experience (QoE) management has increasingly played an important role in guaranteeing the expected video quality perceived by the users with the minimal network resource. To achieve this, QoE must be automatically monitored and accurately controlled when it falls to a specific threshold. However, how to determine the QoE threshold with a scientific basis has not been carefully studied yet. In this paper, a new method to determine a QoE threshold based on biological information is proposed for a QoE management in HAS services. More concretely, the QoE threshold is determined by modeling the impact of the stimulus on the biological information obtained from the users who are watching videos. As the biological information, Skin Conductance and Heart Rate associated with Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) have been investigated. The evaluation results demonstrate that the QoE management by using the determined threshold can save more than 4.855% of the bandwidth consumption per control ensuring as high video quality as by using the fair threshold.