In the growing trend of technology, it is important to keep up with user expectation and his level of satisfaction. Thus, there is high demand for Quality of Experience (QoE) in the research domain. The Quality of Experience is defined as the degree of delight or annoyance of the user of an application or service. It results from the fulfillment of his or her expectations with respect to the utility and/or enjoyment of the application or service in the light of the user’s personality and current state. In the context of communication services, it is influenced by content, network, device, application, user expectations and context of use.QoE is a subjective measure whereas QoS is objective. Thus, it is interesting to analyze the behavior of QoE rather than QoS.

1. Influence of Transport Layer Information on QoE
Sri Krishna Srinivas
School of Computing
Blekinge Institute of Technology
Karlskrona, Sweden
srsr16@student.bth.se
Routhu Venkata Sai Kalyan
School of Computing
Blekinge Institute of Technology
Karlskrona, Sweden
vero16@student.bth.se
Abstract—In the recent years, researchers are focusing on
Quality of Experience (QoE) to address user satisfaction level
and to improve their service. In the context of communication
service, it becomes important to analyze the user behavior with
respect to network performance. Since the user is closer to
transport layer than the network layer, we predict that there is a
relationship between the transport level header with the user
satisfaction. In this paper, we propose direction of research in
QoE with respect to the transport layer information, typically
TCP and SCTP flags.
Keywords— QoE; QoE hourglass model; sustainable
throughput; transport layer flags
I. INTRODUCTION
In the growing trend of technology, it is important to keep
up with user expectation and his level of satisfaction. Thus,
there is high demand for Quality of Experience (QoE) in the
research domain. The Quality of Experience is defined as the
degree of delight or annoyance of the user of an application or
service. It results from the fulfilment of his or her expectations
with respect to the utility and/or enjoyment of the application
or service in the light of the user’s personality and current
state[1]. In the context of communication services, it is
influenced by content, network, device, application, user
expectations and context of use (cited after Möller, 2010). In
[2], authors evaluated QoE on pentagram model based on
integrality, retain-ability, availability, usability and
instantaneousness. QoE is a subjective measure whereas QoS is
objective. Thus, it is interesting to analyse the behavior of QoE
rather than QoS.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section
II describes the QoE hourglass model, Section III adds the
survey of literature in the transport layer and QoE, Section IV
concludes the paper and points the directions for future work.
II. QOE HOURGLASS MODEL
In the communication domain of QoE, the QoE hourglass
model inspired by the classical hourglass model was proposed
in [3]. The authors consider the TCP/IP hourglass model and
develop QoE hourglass model as shown in fig.1. The
bottleneck constraints of number of the network layer protocol
namely IPv4 and IPv6 in the TCP/IP hourglass model also
creates a bottleneck for QoE hourglass model.
In the recent year, numerous work has been established in
finding the relationship between the network layer and QoE.
But, it is fact that transport layer is more important than the
network layer because it is closer to the user than network
layer and change in the degree of satisfaction or degree of
annoyance
Fig. 1: QoE hourglass Model [3]
is reflected directly on transport layer than to the network
layer. So, it becomes significant to study the
behavior of the transport layer in terms of user’s satisfaction.
III. SURVEY OF LITERATURE
A. Transport Layer
As the main focus is on the transport layer it becomes
essential to know about the transport layer protocols and their
purpose. The three main transport layer protocols under
consideration are UDP, TCP and SCPT. For the application
like IP telephony and streaming video, UDP protocol is used
because of its main properties like the speed of delivery and
low overhead whereas for applications like Email, file transfer
and HTTP, TCP protocol is used because of its reliability [4].
TCP is a connection-oriented protocol that addresses to flow
control, congestion control and error control whereas UDP is a
connectionless protocol which does not address the above [5].
However, an increasing number of recent applications have

2. found TCP too limiting and have incorporated their own
reliable data transfer protocol on top of UDP [RFC0768].
Thus, a new protocol SCTP was proposed.
Since UDP does not provide any control traffic
information other than source port address and destination port
address it is evident that the study must progress on the basis
of TCP and SCTP control traffic (i.e. TCP or SCTP flags) with
respect to QoE.
Furthermore, the user uses the Internet mainly for
information retrieval, instant messaging and multimedia
applications. The focus on multimedia applications, mainly
video streaming (ex. YouTube), for QoE study is sufficient to
address the others as well.
B. Sustainable throughput and transport layer throughput
The notation sustainable throughput, sometimes also
called reliable throughput, ensures user satisfaction level at
the same time requires optimum resource to provide the
service. The Provisioning Delivery Hysteresis with resource-
related and success-related satisfaction rating function for
sustainable throughput is provided in [6]. Thus, there opens a
new domain to relate QoE throughput and transport layer
throughput (precisely, goodput) for further investigation.
C. Study on TCP flags
Progress in QoE in relation with Transport layer flags is
discussed in this subsection. The relation between the change
in Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and the TCP-SYN, FIN flags
are established in [7]. The authors claim that delay in TCP
packet can be detected by the increment in the percentage of
SYN TCP packets and packet loss can be observed by TCP-
SYN and FIN packet decrements. Thus, the user’s MOS is
related to TCP-SYN and FIN flags.
In [8], the annoyance of the user is measured in terms of
TCP-RST flag, which is set when the user stops or reloads the
web page in a browser. They claim that the abortions result in
early termination of the TCP connections with Reset (RST)
flag from the client-side [8]. Therefore, the client side traffic,
i.e. reverse traffic, can also trigger the information about QoE.
Moreover, it was observed that as the connection termination
behavior is heavily dependent on the type of Web browser
used, the TCP RST flag alone cannot be used to detect the user
action performed in the Web browser [8].
Thus, it becomes evident that the research in this domain
needs more progress in terms of TCP and SCTP flags.
D. Tools
In this subsection tools that can be used to measure the
traffic parameters and QoE are mentioned. Wireshark is the
most popular tool for traffic analysis [7]. Other tools that can
be used for the study are Netstat and Iperf. Netstat is command
line network utility tool, which provides the information about
incoming/outgoing connections, routing tables and network
protocols statistics [9]. Iperf supports tuning of various
parameters related to timing, buffers and protocols (TCP, UDP,
SCTP with IPv4 and IPv6) [10].
Furthermore, YoMoApp and VLQoE can be used to
measure multimedia characteristics. YoMoApp provides time
series graph of a video playback and monitoring of stalling
events [11]. VLQoE captures the re-buffering events, freeze
indication, user rating (UR), signal strength (RSSI) and the
number of packets/second [12].
IV. CONCLUSION
From this survey, it is evident that Transport layer
behaviour must be studied so as to reflected the degree of
satisfaction or annoyance of the end user. By such a study,
QoE of the service can be improved.
Future work in this domain is as follows. Understanding
the control traffic flags in TCP and SCTP to improve QoE and
nature of new TCP protocols like CUBIC on QoE is
important. Moreover, to analyse TCP fast open and HTTP
pipelining in terms of QoE is another domain of research as
both of them have only 1 RTT. Furthermore, the newly
proposed SPDY protocol, having contention window size as
10 utilizes HTTPS and TLS that improves the delivery time of
the packets [13], must be investigated in terms of QoE.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors express the deepest thanks to Mr. Markus
Fiedler for providing valuable comments, suggestions and
encouragement on this topic.
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