- Video conferencing has become indispensable in both professional and social contexts. From a networking point of view, timely distribution of media to all clients participating in a video conference is required. However, fluctuating network conditions pose a challenge, so that a high Quality of Experience (QoE) might not always be achieved. When assessing how network conditions impact the QoE of video conferencing, previous QoE studies focused on one-to-one settings and suffered from small numbers of participants due to their costly laboratory setups. In this work, we investigate crowdsourcing-based QoE studies for video conferencing in order to obtain a higher number and more globally distributed and diverse participants. For this, we consider multi-party video conferencing and design a web-based study framework which provides a high realism to online study participants by involving themselves in the presented video call. Finally, we conduct a QoE study with our framework toVideo conferencing has become indispensable in both professional and social contexts. From a networking point of view, timely distribution of media to all clients participating in a video conference is required. However, fluctuating network conditions pose a challenge, so that a high Quality of Experience (QoE) might not always be achieved. When assessing how network conditions impact the QoE of video conferencing, previous QoE studies focused on one-to-one settings and suffered from small numbers of participants due to their costly laboratory setups. In this work, we investigate crowdsourcing-based QoE studies for video conferencing in order to obtain a higher number and more globally distributed and diverse participants. For this, we consider multi-party video conferencing and design a web-based study framework which provides a high realism to online study participants by involving themselves in the presented video call. Finally, we conduct a QoE study with our framework to demonstrate the suitability of crowdsourcing for assessing the QoE impact of network-level and application-level degradations of video conferencing applications.…
