Understanding the Basics of Quality of Experience – Gaming Focused
March 30, 2020
What is the Problem?
Offering better Quality of Experience (or customer experience) is a new mantra, as the networks are becoming more capable. What is the framework for understanding and hence eventually designing a network to offer better QoE?
Key Takeaways
Operator needs to follow logical steps to deploy high QoE networks. They need to –
- Understand the applications
- Throughput sensitive
- Delay sensitive
- Loss sensitive
- Know what drives the experience
- Know that QoE is an aggregate experience
- Engineer the network to meet QoE needs
Executive Summary
Customer experience, Quality of Experience and Quality of Service are all related terms. They are being used interchangeably by vendors and operators causing too many confusing marketing messages. This white paper attempts to de-clutter these concepts with the help of the gaming application.
In summary, customer experience is a representation of the needs of an individual application, whereas the Quality of Experience (QoE) is that of an aggregation of applications. There are different levels of aggregations in realizing QoE – inside the home, across the network at different aggregation points and in the servers where the applications are hosted.
Offering good QoE requires classification of applications from their needs point of view, understand how to meet such needs at different aggregation points and fill up the missing pieces as the deficiencies arise (such as WiFi6, low latency DOCSIS etc.). Also, it is essential to identify what portion of the customer expectation cannot be satisfied by the operators – one cannot take the blame for things they cannot control.
Key Words: Applications, QoE, QoS, Customer Experience, Throughput, Delay, Latency, Gaming
