Steven Schmidt - Assessing the Quality of Experience of Cloud Gaming Services (T-Labs Series in Telecommunication Services)

It is the aim of the Springer Series in Telecommunication Services to foster an interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge addressing all topics which are essential for developing high-quality and highly usable telecommunication services. This includes basic concepts of underlying technologies, distribution networks, architectures and platforms for service design, deployment and adaptation, as well as the users perception of telecommunication services. By taking a vertical perspective over all these steps, we aim to provide the scientific bases for the development and continuous evaluation of innovative services which provide a better value for their users. In fact, the human-centric design of high-quality telecommunication services the so called quality engineering forms an essential topic of this series, as it will ultimately lead to better user experience and acceptance. The series is directed towards both scientists and practitioners from all related disciplines and industries.

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In todays age, various telecommunications services have become indispensable. However, not only telephony and video conferences but also gaming services determine the everyday life of many people. Driven by improvements in domains such as video encoding, virtualization, and processing power, a new paradigm called cloud gaming emerged. These services execute a video game on a distant cloud server and stream the resulting scene as a video to the user, who in turn can control the game remotely. Although this new type of service offers many advantages, it also poses many challenges to network providers and service operators, since cloud gaming services are particularly susceptible to latency and require a high bandwidth.

This book describes methods for measuring the quality of experience (QoE) of cloud gaming services which will not only allow comparable and valid research but also provide all necessary means to collect data for the development of QoE prediction models. These models can be used to plan network infrastructures and to optimize resource allocation. Aiming to establish a link between academia and industry, and to reduce the gap between quality of service (QoS) and QoE research, the presented work strongly contributes to recommendations of the Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T). The reader will hopefully understand that knowledge about various influencing factors, assessment methods, and prediction models is necessary to develop and maintain a cloud gaming service successfully. The book is written for students, researchers, and engineers interested in the assessment of the QoE of cloud gaming services. The presented assessment method and other research findings may in particular be useful for persons aiming to develop gaming QoE prediction models and to investigate specific parameters of a cloud gaming service by means of user studies.

The work presented was carried out within the scope of my PhD dissertation, which was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Mller in the Quality and Usability Lab at Technische Universitt Berlin from 2016 to 2021.

The path to finalizing a dissertation is long and full of obstacles, but I have met numerous people who helped me overcome all these challenges over the past years, and I am truly thankful.

Foremost, I would like to express my deepest thanks to my supervisor Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Mller for providing me with guidance throughout all these years. Thank you very much for your continuous support, for all the time we spent with discussions, for your recommendations about various decisions I had to make, and for enabling exciting opportunities for my personal growth.

My time at the Quality and Usability Lab was not only joyful due to an interesting research topic but first and foremost due to all my great colleagues, of whom some turned into good friends.

Among these, my greatest thanks go to Saman Zadtootaghaj. You were an inspiration in many aspects of our close collaboration. Thank you for being such a good friend, for your reliable and professional support, for always being honest and open-minded, and for the many interesting discussions we had to progress in our research. I want to give special thanks to Babak Naderi. Thank you for always being there, sharing your experiences, introducing me to the challenges of crowdsourcing, and the many interesting discussions about statistics we had. You helped me not lose myself in my thought processes and are truly a great team player. Furthermore, I would like to express my gratitude to Saeed Shafiee Sabet for the delightful and constructive collaboration. You showed me different perspectives on our complex topic, and I could always count on you. A great thank you also goes to Nabajeet Barman. It was a pleasure to work with you, and I am thankful for all the great advice you gave me on the academic and personal level. Thank you, Justus Beyer, for initiating the gaming QoE research at the QU Lab, introducing me to your work, and the interesting research proposal you wrote.