Resource allocation with incomplete information for QoE-driven multimedia communications

Abstract

Most existing Quality of Experience (QoE)-driven multimedia resource allocation methods assume that the QoE model of each user is known to the controller before the start of the multimedia playout. However, this assumption may be invalid in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we address the resource allocation problem with incomplete information where the realized mean opinion score (MOS) can only be observed over time, but the underlying QoE model and playout time are unknown. We consider two variants of this problem: 1) the form of the QoE model is known but the parameters are unknown; 2) both the form and the parameters of the QoE model are unknown. For both cases, we develop dynamic resource allocation schemes based on online test-optimization strategy. Simply speaking, one first spends appropriate time on testing the QoE model, then optimizes the sum of the MOS in the remaining playout time. The highlight of this paper lies in resolving the inherent tension between the test and optimization by jointly considering the uncertainties of QoE model and playout time. Furthermore, we derive tight bounds on the MOS loss incurred by the proposed schemes in comparison with the optimal scheme that knows the QoE model a priori and prove that the performance gap, as the playout time tends to infinity, asymptotically shrinks to zero. 2013 IEEE.