QoX: What is it really?

ETSI TC on Human Factors

This article provides a very good article around QoX where X stands for anything, specifically it encompasses Quality of Service (QoS), Class of Service (CoS), Grade of Service (GoS), Quality of Resilience (QoR), and - last but not least - Quality of Experience (QoE).

At the beginning the article provides an overview about different QoS definitions and application/traffic/service classes as defined by various standard-developing organizations (SDOs) such as ITU-T, IETF, 3GPP, and IEEE. Also an attempt to perform the mapping between service classes defined within various approaches is given. Additionally, no so well-known terms such as Grade of Service (GoS) and Quality of Resilience are described.

The article provides a good definition of Quality of Experience (QoE), its various dimensions, and how it relates to the other QoX terms and to a general model which defines three levels of QoS: intrinsic (network performance; ITU-T E.800), perceived (QoS; ITU-T G.1000), and assessed (QoE; ITU-T P.10). It is concluded that QoE is somewhere on the border between perceived and assessed which I tend to agree. Interestingly, the article points out the various dimensions of QoE including environmental, psychological, and sociological factors such as user expectation, experience with similar services, opinions of others (i.e., social networks), pricing policies, location-based factors, etc. Also, QoE measures and metrics, classification of QoE evaluation methods, and the relationship between QoE and intrinsic quality parameters are highlighted.

Finally, the article is concluded with open issues clusters into scientific, technical, economical, and legal challenges.

In particular, I like:

• the introduction into the terminology and how QoX is realized in various SDOs (ITU-T, IETF, 3GPP, IEEE);
• the definition of QoE and its variants; and
• the challenges at the end.

However, I'm missing vital, novel, future applications in/around QoX, otherwise one might think that the aim of this research is providing a solution/fix to current issues only (btw. that's fine, don't get me wrong ;-)

Citation:
Stankiewicz, R.; Cholda, P.; Jajszczyk, A.; , "QoX: What is it really?," Communications Magazine, IEEE , vol.49, no.4, pp.148-158, April 2011
doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2011.5741159