The project addresses the needs for models, methodologies and tools for an effective management of the QoE along the whole chain of design, production, delivery and control of multimedia services. Particular attention will be devoted to three applications: mobile gaming, social TV, and web-services.
This figure shows the interaction between the QoE-Net research areas and the eco-system of factors in multimedia service provisioning, where the quality of experience should be strongly considered:

• Content and context-aware coding: it refers to the coding procedures for optimised QoE at the server side, to be aware of the content to be compressed and protected from errors and the context where the content will be consumed.
• Context and network-aware delivery: it refers to the media delivery or transmission mechanisms which are able to optimise QoE from network side.
• Content and context-aware decoding/displaying: it refers to decoding procedures and displaying techniques for optimised QoE at user terminal side.
• QoE monitoring, control and management: it refers to the activities of monitoring, control and management which should be conducted in each of the three blocks described above.
• QoE definition, modelling and evaluation: it refers to the definition/features and modelling of QoE, and evaluation of QoE models based on user subjective tests.

As shown in the figure, in addition to the above key technical aspects addressed along the media delivery chain, non-technical aspects which will have a strong impact on QoE will also be investigated. These include: the environmental impact or the context awareness on QoE; the psychological/social impact on user perception and consequently on QoE; the business impact (e.g. cost or financial aspects) on QoE; the impact of different services on QoE; the aesthetics/art and design impact; the display/rendering of multimedia contents and their impact on QoE. As highlighted, all these procedures in this project will be guided by the three key applications.
Every factor is strictly linked to each other and the management of the QoE needs a complete understanding of all issues involved. For this reason the ESRs involved in the network will study the whole QoE eco-system together with an in-depth investigation of the issues covering one or more specific factor(s).