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Quality of Experience in Convergent Communication Ecosystems

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Media Convergence Handbook - Vol. 2

Part of the book series: Media Business and Innovation ((MEDIA))

Abstract

While for several decades research in telecommunications has been strongly focusing on engineering aspects, more recently a clear trend towards more interdisciplinary approaches has evolved and is about to result in a significant paradigm change. More specifically, the holistic characterization of systems of private and business customers, which interact with each other using telecommunication services, together with the underlying technological environment (including e.g., networks as well as customer equipment), has led to establishing the notion of ‘Communication Ecosystems’. In this chapter, we focus on recent advances in Quality of Experience (QoE) as a key example for the corresponding interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of cutting-edge technology, microeconomics and user-centered approaches. We start by describing the paradigm change from QoS to QoE and its implications for convergent communication systems, and focus subsequently on the search for the underlying laws of QoE. Based on that, we also address the question of how to charge for QoE and discuss the corresponding fixpoint problem which results from the double role of charging as input and output factor for a subjective quality evaluation. Finally, we summarize the most important directions for future work in this exciting and highly topical area of research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Advancing the Customer Experience (ACE) is the title of a series of COMET projects which are performed at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW) and investigate the link between technical network parameters and the customer’s Quality of Experience (QoE). For further details, please refer to the project web site at http://ace.ftw.at.

  2. 2.

    See http://www.dagstuhl.de for further details.

  3. 3.

    See http://www.qualinet.eu/ for further details.

  4. 4.

    slightly varying the famous bon mot ascribed to David Hume that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”(Essays: moral, political, literary, London 1742)

  5. 5.

    Economics and Technologies for Inter-Carrier Services (ETICS) is a European Community’s Seventh Framework Program running 2010–2013 under grant agreement no. 248567. Further information is available at www.ict-etics.eu.

  6. 6.

    http://www.ftw.at/portfolio/i-lab?set_language=en

  7. 7.

    For a comprehensive example including all three dimensions, we would like to refer for instance to the evolution and deployment of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (Camarillo & García-Martín, 2006) aiming at the convergence of mobile and fixed networks and services with the Internet (Reichl, Bessler, Fabini et al., 2006).

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Acknowledgments

This paper is mainly based on the inaugural lecture of the RBUCE WEST International Research Chair NICE (Network-based Information and Communication Ecosystems) at Université Européenne de Bretagne, which has been given by the author on January 23, 2013, at Télécom Bretagne Rennes, France. RBUCE WEST is jointly financed by Institut Mines-Télécom Paris and the EU FP7 Marie Curie program. Additional support by the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW) in the framework of the EU FP7 project ETICS and the CELTIC project QuEEN as well as COST Action IC 1003 (QualiNet) is gratefully acknowledged. The author would like to thank his colleagues Sebastian Möller, Kalevi Kilkki, Markus Fiedler, Bruno Tuffin, Patrick Maillé, Gerardo Rubino, Martin Varela, Andreas Sackl, Patrick Zwickl, Sebastian Egger, Raimund Schatz and Alexander Raake for many valuable discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Vienna, Währinger Strasse 29, 1090, Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Peter Reichl

  2. Department RSM, Université Européenne de Bretagne/Télécom Bretagne Rennes, 2 rue de la Châtaigneraie, 35576, Cesson-Sevigné, France

    Peter Reichl

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Correspondence to Peter Reichl .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Media, Culture, Curtin University, Bentley - Perth, West Australia, Australia

    Artur Lugmayr

  2. Académie du Journalisme et des Médi, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel-ch, Switzerland

    Cinzia Dal Zotto

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Reichl, P. (2016). Quality of Experience in Convergent Communication Ecosystems. In: Lugmayr, A., Dal Zotto, C. (eds) Media Convergence Handbook - Vol. 2. Media Business and Innovation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54487-3_12

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