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Section: New Software and Platforms
ACQUAmobile
Keywords: Android - Internet access - Performance measure - Quality of Experience
Functional Description: ACQUA is an Application for prediCting QUality of Experience (QoE) at Internet Access. It is developed by the Diana team at Inria Sophia Antipolis – Méditerranée and was supported by Inria under the ADT ACQUA grant. The scientific project around ACQUA is supported by Inria Project Lab BetterNet and the French National Project ANR BottleNet. The project also got the approval of Inria COERLE and French CNIL for the part on experimentation with real users. ACQUA presents a new way for the evaluation of the performance of Internet access. Starting from network-level measurements as the ones we often do today (bandwidth, delay, loss rates, jitter, etc), ACQUA targets the estimated Quality of Experience (QoE) related to the different applications of interest to the user without the need to run them (e.g., estimated Skype quality, estimated video streaming quality).
An application in ACQUA is a function, or a model, that links the network-level and device-level measurements to the expected Quality of Experience. Supervised machine learning techniques are used to establish such link between measurements both at the network level and the device level, and estimations of the Quality of Experience for different Internet applications. The required data for such learning can be obtained either by controlled experiments as we did in [22], [21] on YouTube Quality of Experience, or by soliciting the crowd (i.e. crowdsourcing) for combinations (i.e. tuples) of measurements and corresponding application-level Quality of Experience. Our current work is concentrating on using the ACQUA principle in the estimation and prediction of the Quality of Experience for main user’s applications. We refer to the web site of the project for further details.
The ACQUA Android application is supposed to be on one hand the reference application for QoE forecasting and troubleshooting for end users at their Internet access, and on the other hand, the feedback channel that allows end users to report to us (if they are willing) on their experience together with the corresponding network measurements so as to help us calibrating better and more realistic models. For this calibration, we are currently performing extensive, efficient and automatic measurements in the laboratory, we will count on end users to help us completing this dataset with further applications and more realistic network and user conditions.
ACQUA is mainly meant for end users, but it is also of interest to (mobile) network operators and to content providers to estimate the QoE of their customers and their networks without each time having to run expensive application-level traffic and to involve real users.