Standards Development

Scope

To develop an International Standards for requirements of user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) for
multimedia conferencing services.

Purpose

With the global COVID-19 pandemic, the meetings on business and education have shifted from offline to online modes. Consequently, a range of multimedia conferencing services has been developed, enabling users to choose and enjoy conferencing services based on personal preferences. To ensure optimal user experience, it is essential to measure the Quality of Experience (QoE) for multimedia conferencing services.

However, there is currently a lack of standardized methods for measuring a user's QoE in this context. Thus, there is a pressing need to provide guidelines for measuring and evaluating a user's QoE for multimedia conferencing services.

Traditionally, Quality of Service (QoS) has been measured for network data communication, represented by objective index values like delay, throughput, and jitter. In contrast, QoE represents a user's level of satisfaction with a specific service and reflects human emotional quality. As such, QoE is subject to overall service performance from the user's perspective. In the case of multimedia conferencing services, measuring QoE is challenging due to varying user preferences/requirements and service/application characteristics. Therefore, a unified framework is necessary to measure and evaluate a user's QoE for multimedia conferencing services.

This document (IEC 63478) aims to provide guidelines for enhancing a user's QoE for multimedia conferencing services. The series specifies general considerations and requirements to enhance a user's QoE and measurement methods for associated QoE parameters.

The IEC 63478 consists of the following parts:

- Part 1: General;

- Part 2: Requirements; and

- Part 3: Measurement methods.

Part 1 of IEC 63478-1 (Technical Report) describes general considerations to measure user's QoE.

Part 2 of IEC 63478-2 (International Standard) describes the requirements to be considered to measure user's QoE.

Part 3 of IEC 63478-3 (International Standard) describes the measurement methods for QoE parameters.