A QoE Testbed for socially aware video-mediated group communication

Video-Mediated group communication is filtering into everyday use, as commercial products enable people to connect with friends and relatives. Current solutions provide basic support, so that communication can happen, but do they enable conversations? This paper argues that the purpose and the context of the conversation are influential factors that are rarely taken into consideration. The aim should be on the development of underlying mechanisms that can seamless palliate the effects of networking variances (e.g., delays) and optimize media and connection for every single participant. In particular, our interest is on how to improve remote multi-party gatherings by dynamically adjusting network and communication parameters, depending on the ongoing conversation. If we are to provide a software component that can, in real-time, monitor the Quality of Experience (QoE), we would have to carry out extensive experiments under different varying (but controllable) conditions. Unfortunately, there are no tools available that provide us the required fined-grained level of control. This paper reports on our efforts implementing such a testbed. It provides the experiment conductor with the possibility of modifying and monitoring network and media conditions in real-time.