Measuring and analyzing complex networks such as the Internet has been the focus of many research efforts for over two decades now. While this approach has lead to an improved understanding of the Internet and an enhancement of the management and operation of large-scale complex networks, little has been done to understand and manage the traffic and the network from a user-centric perspective. QoE remains a poorly understood domain, currently restricted to small scale lab studies and very far from the analysis of real large scale traffic measurements and networks. Especially in the industry, QoE has become a buzz word, far from its reality within the research community, and partly due to the complexity involved in deploying QoE-based network analysis and management solutions.

In addition, network operators and service providers currently struggle to keep their increasingly demanding customers happy in an increasingly competitive and complex environment, while remaining profitable at the same time. The sheer development of novel end-user services demands more and better user-centric quality concepts and metrics applied to real world operational networks. We see current and future networks becoming more and more end-user experience aware, but there is still a long way to go to make of QoE one of the guiding paradigms for network design, management, and operation. As a first step, we need to better understand real networks and their traffic through the eyes of the end-user.

The goal of the 2nd ACM SIGCOMM Internet-QoE workshop is to scale QoE out of the lab studies context and bring it to the design, analysis and operation of real world networks and traffic. By fostering an explicit and deep integration of the end-user directly into the analysis and management of traffic and networks, we expect to reduce the gap between QoE research and its application to future network management paradigms, as well as to provide a more targeted end-user perspective to the research on Internet analysis and its future development.