  HTTP based adaptive video streaming has become a popular choice of streaming
due to the reliable transmission and the flexibility offered to adapt to
varying network conditions. However, due to rate adaptation in adaptive
streaming, the quality of the videos at the client keeps varying with time
depending on the end-to-end network conditions. Further, varying network
conditions can lead to the video client running out of playback content
resulting in rebuffering events. These factors affect the user satisfaction and
cause degradation of the user quality of experience (QoE). It is important to
quantify the perceptual QoE of the streaming video users and monitor the same
in a continuous manner so that the QoE degradation can be minimized. However,
the continuous evaluation of QoE is challenging as it is determined by complex
dynamic interactions among the QoE influencing factors. Towards this end, we
present LSTM-QoE, a recurrent neural network based QoE prediction model using a
Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The LSTM-QoE is a network of cascaded
LSTM blocks to capture the nonlinearities and the complex temporal dependencies
involved in the time varying QoE. Based on an evaluation over several publicly
available continuous QoE databases, we demonstrate that the LSTM-QoE has the
capability to model the QoE dynamics effectively. We compare the proposed model
with the state-of-the-art QoE prediction models and show that it provides
superior performance across these databases. Further, we discuss the state
space perspective for the LSTM-QoE and show the efficacy of the state space
modeling approaches for QoE prediction.
