Welcome to Mobile Content Quality of Experience

Qshine 2007 Workshop

Scope

B3G and 4G are all about services. Beyond the complex technologies, the ultimate scope is to enhance the wireless user experience with a high choice of data services with a fast response. Mobile content and services involve the participation of many players, not only the carrier, as it was the case for circuit-switch voice services (2G networks). All of them are interested in continuously improving and monitoring the end-to-end quality experienced by subscribers. Besides pure content related issues, bad quality experience may come from the very complex network delivering mobile content, from the content server all the way to the subscriber devices. Such networks, heterogeneous in nature, could be modeled as a chain of links, where end-to-end performance depends on the quality provided by each link.

For a long time, by extrapolating the Internet dial-up experience, throughput and latency have been considered the only significant quality metrics for data services. While still true for data transfer services, the approach is no more valid for mobile content. Data packets move back and forth between clients and servers, even when content is denied, and measuring such throughput has no significance, as long as content is not delivered to subscribers. Good subscriber experience needs applications’ conformance to supporting standards and protocols as well as consideration to devices’ attributes.

New mobile media characteristics bring new interoperability issues because of the huge number of handsets to support, and the proliferation of languages and media: XHTML, i-Mode, full track download, MMS, video/audio streaming, etc. Managing and enforcing service level agreements is an intricate task, due to the challenge to monitor many services running on many different terminals and platforms. Finding the reason for a content failure is as important as finding the failure itself, and in order to improve the end-user experience, quality management has to follow the service life cycle.

The Workshop

The workshop tries to address all the technical aspects of implementing a comprehensive process for content provisioning, optimization and monitoring of the delivered quality, with the scope of increasing mobile subscribers’ experience.

* Promotes communication and interaction among players in the value-chain, necessary for enhancing the quality of experience for mobile content.

* Facilitates discussions and encourages the formulation and adoption of ideas to enable rapid development, testing and deployment of high quality mobility content.

* Encourages the harmonization between technologies supporting end-to-end content delivery, from original content creation to subscribers’ experience.

Address of the Conference: The Empire Landmark hotel and conference centre, 1400 Robson Street,Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Sponsors:

In-Cooperation with ACM SIGMM, SIGMOBILE, and SIGSIM

Technically co-sponsored by IEEE Communications Society