The Fourth International IEEE Workshop on Quality of Experience Centric Management (QCMan) will be held in Würzburg, Germany in conjunction with ITC 2016, which is technically co-sponsored by IEEE Communications Society (IEEE ComSoc) and the Information Technology Society within VDE (ITG VDE), and in-cooperation with ACM SIGCOMM. The workshop is supported by the University of Würzburg, RWTH Aachen, AIT Wien, and the University of Missouri.

In recent years, the Internet has evolved from a pure packet forwarder to a provider of complex and high demanding services and applications (e.g., video, voice, on-line gaming, cloud applications). These services and applications are typically managed through a set of Quality of Services parameters (e.g. packet loss, delay, jitter). However, it is widely agreed that the management of these services and applications should be centered on their quality as perceived by the end user: the Quality of Experience (QoE). However, this QoE centric management is greatly challenged in today’s Internet by (i) the stringent QoE requirements of the supported services and applications (e.g., timing constraints, loss intolerance) and users (e.g., unpredictability of user behavior, request for high quality services), (ii) the plethora of service consumption possibilities (e.g. for video: live vs on-demand, managed vs over-the-top), (iii) the inherent complexity of services and applications which can be offered to users in several ways to reach the same QoE level and (iv) the difficulty in assessing the quality as perceived by the end user also due to insufficient insight in the psychological and sociological factors of the service and application consumption.