Invited speaker:  dr. Peter Reichl,
                           Telecommunications Research Center Vienna

From ‘Quality-of-Service’ and ‘Quality-of-Design’ to ‘Quality-of-Experience’: A Holistic View on Future Interactive Telecommunication Services

Thursday, Sept. 27 (Split, Hotel Le Meridien Lav)


Abstract: Telecommunications research can no longer be consid-ered to be pure communications engineering. The convergence of fixed-line and mobile telephony with the Internet together with the rise of novel technologies for rapid service creation has made economic efficiency and user acceptance/usability to cru-cial factors for the success of the telecommunication business as such. In the emerging new paradigm, a holistic view onto the entire value chain from basic architectural concepts over the efficient design and implementation of new services and applica-tions up to the end customer is becoming indispensable. Within this broad interdisciplinary field, the present paper focuses on the evolution of corresponding concepts for service quality. Whereas the traditional notion of ‘QoS’ (Quality-of-Service) is already well-established and has led to a plethora of research work mainly in the area of network architectures and protocols, the quality of service design (‘QoD’) has by far not received comparable attention in the research community. Nevertheless, we argue that both concepts are equally important for achieving a sufficient quality of user experience (‘QoE’) which eventually leads to both economic viability and user satisfaction. To illus-trate our claim, we discuss recent developments in the area of QoS-enabled next generation network architectures as well as novel user-centric service design paradigms, examples for the resulting QoE evaluations and a novel HCI lab approach which allows flexible user tests of mobile applications “in the wild”.

Biography: Peter Reichl has studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Munich and Cambridge (UK). After receiving his diploma he was member of the scientific staff at RWTH Aachen, Bell Labs (Murray Hill, NJ), and ETH Zurich, where he finished his PhD thesis on tariff and traffic modeling for the Internet. Since 2001, he is working as Key Researcher at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.), being responsible for the research area "Economic and User Aspects of Telecommunications" and leading several strategic and application-oriented projects in the areas of Internet Economics, Human-Computer Interaction, wireless networks and 3GPP IMS. Dr. Reichl has published more than 70 scientific papers in the areas of Internet Economics, mobile and wireless networks, user-perceived QoS, traffic engineering, network management and performance evaluation. From 2001 to 2006, he served as co-chair of the annual international workshop series on "Internet Charging and QoS Technology" (ICQT) and was active as co-editor of several special journal issues, e.g. with the Journal of Computer Communications and the Journal of Computer Networks. His teaching experience includes a variety of tutorials for academic and industry-related audiences as well as academic courses, e.g. as Distinguished Guest Lecturer at TU Graz.