Measuring and quantifying mobile user quality of experience

The objective of this research is to develop an on-device, quality of experience (QoE) measurement suite, for Android based mobile devices. As mobile devices become the predominant method with which the world accesses the internet, it becomes increasingly important to understand the complex interaction between applications, mobile OS’s, the networks they run on, and the behaviours of a user base at large. Doing so with mobile devices raises a set of issues that aren’t present with traditional PC’s, and as such haven’t been explored thoroughly. This process of understanding will facilitate maintaining, and improving upon, the end user’s derived value through their experience with their mobile device. The suite to be developed here, and the work that will go into developing it, will aide in evaluating the degree to which the aforementioned information can be collected, and how it can assist application developers and network providers in being able to qualitatively discern user QoE, and thereby improve it. In addition, this work will explore the engineering issues behind building this measurement suite, and will be done in participation with partner network service providers and application developers, to ensure the relevance to industry practices, and to the compare the potential improvements over existing practices.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Thomas Darcie

Student:

Alim Jiwa

Partner:

Wesley Clover

Discipline:

Engineering - computer / electrical

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

University of Victoria