Assessing the Quality of Videoconferencing: from Quality of Service to Quality of Communication

Abstract

Various approaches for the assessment of quality of experience for video conferencing exist that try to quantify the level of satisfaction of the user. In order for videoconferencing to really succeed as a substitute of face-to-face meetings, it is constructive to explore the associated quality of communication. One of the most significant factors to ascertain in this regard would be the assessment of the level of user satisfaction for a videoconference instead of a face-to-face meeting. Various recommendations of ITU-T related to this field (such as ITU-T Recommendation P.920) deal with subjective experiments that involve performing interactive tasks in order to quantify the impact of terminal and communication link performance. In addition to looking at different quality paradigms, in this paper, we review a number of subjective studies on videoconferences and investigate the possibilities of discovering more of the user feedback in order to assess the perceived quality of communication experienced in a videoconference. Based on the review, we present a set of future work items which can be useful in finding a comprehensive definition for quality of communication.