End-To-End Management Of Heterogeneous Environments Enabling Quality Of Experience

End-to-end support for Quality of Service (QoS) or Quality of Experience (QoE) has been broadly discussed in the literature. Many technologies have been proposed, each focusing on specific aspects for providing QoS/QoE guarantees to the end user. However, the integrated management of the end-to-end chain preserving QoS/QoE in heterogeneous environments is still an aspect insufficiently addressed to date, regardless the fact that it significantly impacts the overall quality of the service paid by the end-user. In this chapter we propose an integrated management supervisor that takes into account the requirements from all stakeholders along the multimedia content delivery chain. It provides an end-to-end management solution enabling QoS/QoE to the end user. Furthermore, we describe a QoS/QoE model which allows one to measure the perceptual quality of video transmissions by exploiting metrics from different layers (service, application and network) in an interoperable way. As such we are able to keep the quality as experienced by the end user at a satisfactory level, even when facing adverse delivery conditions, without cost-intensive subjective tests. Therefore, we propose a detailed QoS/QoE model for video transmission following the philosophy of the ITU-T's E-model for audio, and show how this can be translated into interoperable description formats offered by the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework, as a contribution to balance the current network neutrality debate among its key players.