Impact of router queuing disciplines on multimedia QoE in IPTV deployments

Internet television (IPTV) is rapidly gaining popularity and is being widely deployed on the Internet. In order to deliver optimum user Quality of Experience (QoE), service providers need to understand and balance the trade-offs involved with user (video content, display device), application (codec type, encoding bit rate) and network (network health, router queuing discipline) factors that affect IPTV deployment. In this paper, we analyze the impact of router queuing disciplines, specifically Packet-ordered and Time-ordered first-in-first-out (FIFO) on the multimedia QoE performance. Our analysis is based on performance measurements of objective QoE metrics such as “perceptible impairment rate” and “frame packet loss” in over 500 test scenarios in an IPTV testbed. Our salient analysis results include: (a) mapping of Good, Acceptable and Poor user QoE grades to network QoS levels, and (b) interplay of user and application factors in the mapped levels - under both PFIFO and TFIFO queuing disciplines.