In 2013, within the context of the COST Action QUALINET, QoE has been defined as:[1]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.This definition has been adopted in 2016 by the International Telecommunication Union in Recommendation ITU-T P.10/G.100.
QoE however is a purely subjective measure from the user's perspective of the overall quality of the service provided, by capturing people's aesthetic and hedonic needs.
In short, QoE provides an assessment of human expectations, feelings, perceptions, cognition and satisfaction with respect to a particular product, service or application.
[5] QoE is a blueprint of all human subjective and objective quality needs and experiences arising from the interaction of a person with technology and with business entities in a particular context.
QoE aims at taking into consideration every factor that contributes to a user's perceived quality of a system or service.
[7] Wechsung and De Moor identify the following key differences between the fields:[2] Historical lack of theoretical frameworks Theoretic background in hedonic psychology Empirical–positivist research Interpretative and constructivist research As a measure of the end-to-end performance at the service level from the user's perspective, QoE is an important metric for the design of systems and engineering processes.
It is a limited form of QoE measurement, relating to a specific media type, in a controlled environment and without explicitly taking into account user expectations.
Since such instrumental video quality algorithms are often developed based on a limited set of subjective data, their QoE prediction accuracy may be low when compared to human ratings.
As an example for an implementation of QoE management, network nodes can become QoE-aware by estimating the status of the multimedia service as perceived by the end-users.