With the exponential growth of the video-based services, it becomes ever more important to cater to the quality expectation of the end users. Video streaming over the Internet, especially through mobile network, has seen rapid growth. While monitoring and controlling QoS parameters of the video transmission system is important for achieving high video quality, it is more crucial to evaluate video quality directly from the users' perspective, which is known as Quality of Experience (QoE), or user-lever QoS. QoE-based video quality assessment is difficult because user experience is subjective, hard to quantify and measure. Moreover, the advent of new video compression standards, the development of video transmission systems, and the advancement of consumer video technologies, all call for a new and better understanding of user QoE.

The traditional way of subjective QoE test has high cost in terms of time, money, and manual effort. Also, the subjective test cannot be used for real-time QoE evaluation. Therefore, there is a growing demand for objective, online QoE prediction and monitoring. Video streaming over the Internet has made large-scale of data available for analyzing user QoE. How to effectively leverage these valuable data to reveal the relationship between QoS and QoE is both challenging and promising. Moreover, there is a lack of QoE analysis for emerging technologies (e.g., 3D Video, videotelephony, video conferencing, and online gaming), as well as for new transmission networks (e.g., mobile network, vehicle network and sensor network). QoE study is especially important for wireless network, since the huge amount of multimedia traffic has posed great pressure on resource-limited wireless networks. Novel design of wireless systems based on QoE index will make a better use of available resources. The goal of this special issue is to seek original articles on QoE-aware research, including examining and leveraging QoE information for cross-layer network optimization, exploiting novel and more efficient image/video codec that can achieve satisfactory user QoE, studying QoE in new media sources (video gaming, VoIP, 3D video ...) and new networks (vehicle, mobile, sensor networks, ...), and proposing QoE-aware multimedia systems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

QoE-aware resource allocation in mobile networks
QoE-aware cross-layer optimization
QoE-aware interference management and admission control in wireless networks
QoE-aware heterogeneous networks architecture and performance analysis
QoE-aware M2M/IoT network architecture and performance analysis
QoE-aware 5G network architecture/techniques, and performance analysis
Energy-aware QoE control in resource-constrained wireless networks
QoS-QoE relationship modeling
Efficient video codec design with guaranteed QoE
QoE evaluation in mobile networks, vehicular networks, sensor networks
QoE evaluation for emerging applications, e.g., 3D video, VVoIP, online gaming
No reference or reduced reference objective QoE models
Subjective QoE testing of wireless social networking services
Real experiments and testbeds for QoE evaluation
QoE-based Internet Video Economics
QoE management and control framework for mobile networks
Design and analysis of secure routing in QoE-aware mobile networks


SUBMISSIONS

With regard to both the content and formatting style of the submissions, prospective contributors should follow the IEEE Network guidelines for authors that can be found at http://www.comsoc.org/netmag/paper-submission-guidelines. Authors should submit their manuscripts through ScholarOne for IEEE Network. Choose "Special Issue - Quality-of-Experience (QoE)-Aware Design and Control in Mobile Networks" from the drop down menu on the submission page.

bullet IMPORTANT DATES

Manuscript submission: April 30, 2015
First revision/reject notification: July 10, 2015
Acceptance notification: August 15, 2015
Final manuscript due: September 15, 2015
Publication date: November 2015


GUEST EDITORS

Qian Zhang
HKUST, Hong Kong
qianzh@cse.ust.hk

Chang Wen Chen
University at Buffalo, USA
chencw@buffalo.edu

Pascal Frossard
EPFL, Switzerland
pascal.frossard@epfl.ch

Kaishun Wu
Shenzhen University, China
wu@szu.edu.cn