Economics of Quality of Experience

International audienc

AWPP: A New Scheme for Wireless Access Control Proportional to Traffic Priority and Rate

Cutting-edge wireless networking approaches are required to efficiently differentiate traffic and handle it according to its special characteristics. The current Medium Access Control (MAC) scheme which is expected to be sufficiently supported by well-known networking vendors comes from the IEEE 802.11e workgroup. The standardized solution is the Hybrid Coordination Function (HCF), that includes the mandatory Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol and the optional Hybrid Control Channel Access (HCCA) protocol. These two protocols greatly differ in nature and they both have significant limitations. The objective of this work is the development of a high-performance MAC scheme for wireless networks, capable of providing predictable Quality of Service (QoS) via an efficient traffic differentiation algorithm in proportion to the traffic priority and generation rate. The proposed Adaptive Weighted and Prioritized Polling (AWPP) protocol is analyzed, and its superior deterministic operation is revealed

Enabling converged satellite and terrestrial access networks

Rural and remote areas, particularly in emerging countries, often lack broadband connectivity mainly due to economic constraints. This limits the access to existing and novel application and services, which often require a high connection speed. At the same time satellite systems have evolved significantly during the last decade leading to a tremendous decrease in cost per bit. In fact, satellite systems can provide very high bandwidth links. However, mainly due to the high signal propagation time, the latency on those links is significantly higher than in terrestrial networks. Simultaneously using terrestrial access technologies, such as, or cooperatively, in parallel to new high speed broadband satellite systems is believed to be a promising option to enable broadband connectivity to rural and remote regions. However, typically used load distributing methods, commonly used multi-homing environments might do more harm than good due to the heterogeneity of the technologies and in particular the higher latency of the satellite systems. This could affect service quality for especially latency sensitive applications. In this work we identify the key building blocks required to realize a converged satellite terrestrial network. Moreover, we present an easy to implement approach based on packet sizes that takes the satellite specifics into account and allows for providing broadband connectivity while maintaining a high QoS for the user

Mobile QoE prediction in the field

Quality of experience (QoE) models quantify the relationship between user experience and network quality of service. With the exception of a few studies, most research on QoE has been conducted in laboratory conditions. Therefore, in order to validate and develop QoE models for the wild, researchers should carry out large scale field studies. This paper contributes data and observations from such a large-scale field study on mobile devices carried out in Finland with 292 users and 64,036 experience ratings. 74% of the ratings are associated with Wifi or LTE networks. We report descriptive statistics and classification results predicting normal vs. bad QoE in in-the-wild measurements. Our results illustrate a 20% improvement over baselines for standard classification metrics (G-Mean). Furthermore, both network features (such as delay) and non-network features (such as device memory) show importance in the models. The models’ performance suggests that mobile QoE prediction remains a difficult problem in field conditions. Our results help inform future modeling efforts and provide a baseline for such real-world mobile QoE prediction.Peer reviewe