Quality of Experience in Telepresence and Remote Collaboration Cloud Services

Cloud-based systems are gaining enormous popularity due to a number of promised benefits, including ease of use in terms of deployment, administration and maintenance, high scalability and flexibility to create new services, and others. However, as more personal and business applications migrate to the Cloud, the quality of the service becomes an important differentiator between providers. This paper addresses the problem of Quality of Experience in Telepresence and Remote Collaboration (TRC) services provided by Microsoft Lync Online (MLO). MLO is a Cloud-based service providing online meeting capabilities including videoconferencing, audio calls, and desktop sharing, and has become the default system for TRC in enterprise scenarios. We present a complete study of the QoE undergone by 44 MLO users (22 pairs, interactive sessions) in controlled subjective lab tests. The study is performed on three different interactive scenarios running on top of the real MLO Cloud service, additionally shaping the Lync flows at the access network to influence the participants’ experience. The scenarios include audio conferencing, videoconferencing, and remote collaboration though desktop sharing. By passively monitoring the end-to-end QoS achieved by the Lync flows, and correlating it with the QoE feedbacks provided by the participants, this study enables better understanding of the interplays between network performance and QoE in TRC Cloud services.