Bridging between Quality of Experience and Quality of Service through TCP Flag Ratios

摘要

Since the early days of Quality of Experience (QoE) research, relationships to Quality of Service (QoS) and corresponding QoE-QoS models have been of great interest to the research community. However, the manifold quality transformations throughout the communication stack, together with accessibility issues of QoS parameters inside networks, hamper availability, applicability and generality of such models. On this background, the paper proposes the use of specific transport layer information, in particular the ratios of selected flags used by the TCP protocol, as QoE indicators. In our work, we show that such flag ratios help identifying, characterizing and quantifying user annoyance from observations anywhere along the TCP connection. As use case, we address video streaming from a TCP CUBIC web server in a wireless setting.