SS3: Sustainable Quality of Experience Management 

Motivation and objectives

Covid-19 and the corresponding lockdowns imposed by governments have stunningly illustrated the dependencies of our society on the Internet in general and on media-intensive services such as video streaming and video-conferencing, specifically. Usage of WebRTC services increased 5-fold since the be ginning of the pandemic. The increase in subscriptions to video streaming portals like HBO, Netflix or Amazon Prime, together with an unprecedented demand for these services resulted in an unforeseen increase in network utilization, stressing the underlying infrastructure. To avoid congestion of major Internet links and cascading effects reducing the Internet Service quality on a large scale, (i) video providers reduced the video quality of their offerings on a global scale to reduce the imposed load on the networks and (ii) regulators like BEREC temporally allowed ISPs to throttle video streams transmitted through their network. Instead of using purposeful, precise mechanisms solving specific problems upon occurrence at locations prone to congestion, global policies needed to be imposed and the applied mechanisms were chosen due to simplicity neglecting potential impact on customers. This uncovers how little we understand the de-facto dominant Internet application video streaming and how primitive today’s mechanisms to control and manage video traffic at scale are.

Recent technological advances have enabled a constant proliferation of novel immersive and interactive services that pose ever-increasing demands to the communication ecosystem. The rise of the Metaverse, utilizing immersive environments and extended reality, is only the most recent example. Similarly, to video-conferencing, such services mark a shift from today’s throughput-orientation towards delay-sensitive services with stringent low latency requirements. How can existing QoS mechanisms cope with this paradigm shift? And how can we build appropriate QoE models required to efficiently operate and optimize the digital infrastructure?

At the same time there is a rise with respect to the number of end devices, type of services and applications, and the application complexity. AR applications are characterized by multi-modal stimuli, e.g., visual, haptic, scent or temperature, with each of these sensory inputs sent having different QoS requirements and traffic patterns. With which degree of granularity need QoS mechanisms work to satisfy the requirements of those applications, and how can scalability of QoE management mechanisms be assured?

Moreover, the dominance of mobile devices also introduces concerns about power usage and battery duration, which also aligns with environmental concerns about the impact of these services on CO2 emissions, etc. Energy efficiency and sustainability are thus additional issues to consider in these contexts.

Additionally, digital infrastructures are continuously evolving and becoming more and more software based, e.g., to fulfill the needs of cellular technologies like 5G and beyond. This includes mature or maturing technologies like software-defined networking, network virtualization, or network function virtualization, as well as the edge-computing cloud paradigm and in-network computing. A large number of tunable parameters on data, control and management results in a high system complexity with hidden performance impacts, without a clear understanding of KPIs/KQIs affecting operational costs, energy efficiency, and the QoE. 

The Special Session will be devoted to topics related to the management of services and applications to improve the user-perceived quality from a holistic viewpoint through the incorporation of QoE awareness in networking technologies, protocols, and algorithms. Proper QoE models and QoE monitoring mechanisms are fundamental for realizing QoE in networking, but also for the performance evaluation of such systems. In addition, the increasing emphasis on sustainability, which goes beyond pure energy efficiency, dictates a new perspective on QoE management which has been largely neglected so far. Further, it is an effort to make to create stronger synergies between the networking communities, like the one6G association, and QoE communities providing a common venue for them to meet. 

Topics of interest

Authors are invited to submit papers that fall into or are related to the topic areas listed below: 

Organizers