With the increase in demand for video streaming services on the hand held mobile terminals with limited battery life, it is important to maintain the user Quality of Experience (QoE) while taking the resource consumption into consideration. Hence, the goal is to offer as good quality as feasible, avoiding as much user-annoyance as possible. Hence, it is essential to deliver the video, avoiding any uncontrollable quality distortions. This can be possible when an optimal (or desirable) throughput value is chosen such that exceeding the particular threshold results in entering a region of unstable QoE, which is not feasible. Hence, the concept of QoE-aware sustainable throughput is introduced as the maximal value of the desirable throughput that avoids disturbances in the Quality of Experience (QoE) due to delivery issues, or keeps them at an acceptable minimum. The thesis aims at measuring the sustainable throughput values when video streams of different resolutions are streamed from the server to a mobile client over wireless links, in the presence of network disturbances packet loss and delay. The video streams are collected at the client side for quality assessment and the maximal throughput at which the QoE problems can still be kept at a desired level is determined. Scatter plots were generated for the individual opinion scores and their corresponding throughput values for the disturbance case and regression analysis is performed to find the best fit for the observed data. Logarithmic, exponential, linear and power regressions were considered in this thesis. The R-squared values are calculated for each regression model and the model with R-squared value closest to 1 is determined to be the best fit. Power regression model and logarithmic model have the R-squared values closest to 1.  Better quality ratings have been observed for the low resolution videos in the presence of packet loss and delay for the considered test cases. It can be observed that the QoE disturbances can be kept at a desirable level for the low resolution videos and from the test cases considered for the investigation, 360px video is more resilient in case of high delay and packet loss values and has better opinion score values. Hence, it can be observed that the throughput is sustainable at this threshold.

Recent years the research focus began on “Quality of Experience” (QoE) that addresses user satisfaction level and improvement of service. The notation sustainable throughput, sometimes also called reliable throughput, ensures user satisfaction level at the same time requires an optimum resource to provide the service. In the context of communication, it becomes important to analyze user behavior with respect to network performance.             Since the user is closer to the transport layer than the network layer, there opens a new domain to relate “QoE aware sustainable throughput” and “TCP throughput”. There is a need to further investigation of “QoE aware sustainable throughput” as it the one which sufficiently QoE, while “TCP throughput” is the result of a control process on a layer. Moreover, it is essential to estimate the QoE aware sustainable throughput based on HTTP streaming on the server and client application may result in a closer understanding of the nature of TCP in terms of user expectation.                In this study, we evaluated the performance of video streaming considering the TCP throughput in the presence of network disturbances, packet loss, and delay. The TCP packet behavior is observed in the experimental test setup. The quality assessment at which the QoE problems can still be kept at the desired level is determined. Mean opinion scores of the preferred use cases for the dash and non-dash server is used to estimate the relationship factor between “TCP throughput” and “QoE aware sustainable throughput”.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the demand for streaming of high quality videos on the smart mobile phones. In order to meet the user quality requirements, it is important to maintain the end user quality while taking the resource consumption into consideration. This demand caught the attention of the research communities and network providers to prioritize Quality of Experience (QoE) in addition to the Quality of Service (QoS). In order to meet the users’ expectations, the QoE studies have gained utmost importance, thus creating the challenge of evaluating it in such a way that the quality, cost and energy consumption are taken into account. This gave way to the concept of QoE-aware sustainable throughput, which denotes the maximal throughput at which QoE problems can be still kept at a desired level. The aim of the thesis is to determine the sustainable throughput values from the QoE perspective. The values are observed for different delay and packet loss values in wireless and mobile scenarios. The evaluation is done using the subjective video quality assessment method. In the subjective assessment method, the evaluation is done using the ITU-T recommended Absolute Category Rating (ACR). The video quality ratings are taken from the users, and are then averaged to obtain the Mean Opinion Score (MOS). The obtained scores are used for analysis in determining the sustainable throughput values from the users’ perspective. From the results it is determined that, for all the video test cases, the videos are rated better quality at low packet loss values and low delay values. The quality of the videos with the presence of delay is rated high compared to the video quality in the case of packet loss. It was observed that the high resolution videos are feeble in the presence of higher disturbances i.e. high packet loss and larger delays. From considering all the cases, it can be observed that the QoE disturbances due to the delivery issues is at an acceptable minimum for the 360px video. Hence, the 480x360 video is the threshold to sustain the video quality.