Towards QoE-aware Mobile Infrastructures

With the development of mobile networks, customer needs and behaviours have changed. Mobile communications means so much more than simple voice communication; there is now mobile Internet with web surfing, videophone, streaming media, and micro blogging. The objective of network optimization has gradually shifted from enhancing network performance to improve quality of experience (QoE). Therefore, assessing and optimizing QoE is the trend for optimizing future mobile networks. Today, users want reliable access for their content, wherever they go in the network. To deliver the best possible experience to mobile broadband subscribers, operators need new ways to assess performance that will enable them to build and manage their networks in the most efficient way. The new paradigmatic eco system (user-interface-network-content) requires novel and disruptive end-to-end considerations in order to enable and sustain the next generation of services and user experience. Thus, the extraordinary adoption of mobile connectivity by end users, and the need for optimized bandwidth management network resource, on the one hand, and the growing interest for good quality content delivery/consumption, is boosting the creation of new network solutions. We consider that by taking advantage of the capacity to support multimedia platforms and applications of mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, etc.) is possible to incorporate and provide awareness to the wireless infrastructures in the context of cross-layer systems to manage the resource allocation according to expected QoE levels. In this thesis, we address the question on how to implement QoE-aware mobile networks and evaluate different schedulers oriented to take advantage of the proposed architecture. We show that by providing QoE-awareness to the network infrastructure is possible to improve user’s QoE and generate impacts in the utilization of the network resources. With this study, we provide insights into the broader question of whether future mobile infrastructures can be deployed considering QoE besides the classical QoS considerations.