Improving user experience and resource management in wireless communications

The increasing use of wireless communications in mobile devices starts a new level of resource management. Users with mobile devices accessing wireless hot spots are a commonplace, and, thus, their management is becoming more important. Furthermore, some aspects of mobile devices are not yet well explored. For example, when the signal energy level at the wireless interface achieves a threshold value, the device increases automatically the transmission power. If the signal fading occurs due to an interference at the wireless channel, this increase in the transmission power will generate more interference. To avoid this problem, another type of management is needed. This work analysis the wireless channel from the user point of view and proposes some types of resource management, to achieve a better communication quality for the application. The communication quality seen by the user depends on the network context, which can be defined as the set of events present at the environment and its impacts over the wireless communication. Two distinct types of events are identified: the mobility of the device and the interference caused by the environment and another devices. From this event identification, the proposed resource management focuses on performing a correct configuration of the wireless interface and shows to the user the correct information about what is happening at the communication channel, improving the user experience. The contribution of this work was a framework to a service that acts as a middleware to the applications, giving the information about the wireless network context.