Modeling the QoE of Rate Changes in Skype/SILK VoIP Calls

The effective end-to-end transport of delay-sensitive voice data has long been a problem in multimedia networking. One of the major issues is determining the sending rate of real-time VoIP streams such that the user experience is maximized per unit network resource consumed. A particularly interesting complication that remains to be addressed is that the available bandwidth is often dynamic. Thus, it is unclear whether a marginal increase warrants better user experience. If a user naively tunes the sending rate to the optimum at any given opportunity, the user experience could fluctuate. To investigate the effects of magnitude and frequency of rate changes on user experience, we recruited 127 human participants to systematically score emulated Skype calls with different combinations of rate changes, including varying magnitude and frequency of rate changes. Results show that 1) the rate change frequency affects the user experience on a logarithmic scale, echoing Weber-Fechner's Law [1], 2) the effect of rate change magnitude depends on how users perceive the quality difference, and 3) this study derives a closed-form model of user perception for rate changes for Skype calls.