Abstract

Cloud computing is currently gaining enormous momentum due to a number of promised benefits: ease of use in terms of deployment, administration and maintenance, high scalability and flexibility to create new services. However, as more personal and business applications migrate to the Cloud, the service quality will become an important differentiator between providers. In particular, Quality of Experience (QoE) as perceived by users has the potential become the guiding paradigm for managing quality in the Cloud. In this article, we discuss technical challenges emerging from shifting services to the Cloud, as well as how this shift impacts QoE and QoE management. Thereby, a particular focus is on multimedia Cloud applications. Together with a novel QoE-based classification scheme of cloud applications, these challenges drive the research agenda on QoE management for Cloud applications