qualityofexperience

Quality of Experience (QoE) is a measure of a user's overall satisfaction with a service or product, taking into account expectations, context, and perceived performance. Unlike Quality of Service (QoS), which focuses on network or service parameters such as bandwidth, latency, and error rates, QoE is subjective and user-centric.

QoE is influenced by factors across the service stack: application characteristics (for example codecs and content type), network performance (latency, jitter, loss), device capabilities, and human factors such as attention and cognitive load. For instance, video streaming quality is affected by startup delay and buffering, voice quality by latency and packet loss, and mobile gaming by overall responsiveness.

Measurement combines subjective and objective approaches. Subjective evaluation uses user surveys to obtain Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) for perceived quality. Objective methods estimate QoE from observable data or use predictive models, including perceptual quality models such as PESQ and modern video quality metrics like VMAF. ITU-T and other bodies provide guidelines for testing and interpretation.

Applications include telecom and cloud services, streaming platforms, and mobile apps, where QoE data informs adaptive streaming, network optimization, and device design. QoE is context-dependent and does not map one-to-one to QoS parameters; providers aim to maximize user satisfaction while balancing cost and resource use.