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User-Centric Measurement, Modeling, and Control of Skype/SILK VoIP Calls


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Date:  Fri, December 12, 2014
Time:  10:30 am
Location:  Holmes Hall 389
Speaker:  Professor Polly Huang, National Taiwan University

Abstract: As the proportion of the multimedia traffic over the Internet rises and the world economy recovers slowly, the issue of streaming Voice/Video content content cost-effectively is ever more pressing. The key question to address here is how to satisfy more (paying) users given limited resources. Users switch to other providers/services because they can't hear/see the content well, not because they detect the fine changes in network loss, delay or jitter, so called Quality of Service (QoS). Over the years, the Internet engineers, although getting very good at designing for QoS, have overlooked the fact that users might not perceive fine changes in QoS, nor the subtle quantitative difference of QoS metrics to the overall user experience. Towards a user-friendly, therefore economically healthy, Internet, we see the need to measure, understand, and redesign various control mechanisms for quality of user experience (QoE), in addition to the QoS. Using Skype/SILK VoIP service as an example, we show how we (1) measure QoE of calls delivered of different QoS, (2) derive models that translate from QoS to QoE, and (3) exploit the model for a design that pleases the users more.

Bio: As a person, Polly Huang is a nerd and a geek. She enjoys observing systems of complexity and loves the process of finding out their true nature. Professionally, she is a professor at National Taiwan University and a visiting scientist at MIT. She swings back and forth among three research interests -- multimedia networking, sensor networking, and mobile computing. Much of the work has been reported in the 100 technical papers and 9 US patents she's co-authored. In 2014, she'll serve as a TPC member of 4 major network and system conferences -- Mobisys'14, Sigcomm'14, Mobicom'14, and Ubicomp'14.


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