Quality of experience management in mobile cellular networks: key issues and design challenges

Telecom operators have recently faced the need for a radical shift from technical quality requirements to customer experience guarantees. This trend has emerged due to the constantly increasing amount of mobile devices and applications and the explosion of overall traffic demand, forming a new era: “the rise of the consumer”. New terms have been coined in order to quantify, manage, and improve the experienced user quality, with QoE being the most dominant one. However, QoE has always been an afterthought for network providers, and thus numerous research questions need to be answered prior to a shift from conventional network-centric paradigms to more user-centric approaches. To this end, the scope of this article is to provide insights on the issue of network-level QoE management, identifying the open issues and prerequisites toward acquiring QoE awareness and enabling QoE support in mobile cellular networks. A conceptual framework for achieving end-to-end QoE provisioning is proposed and described in detail in terms of its design, its constituents and their interactions, as well as the key implementation challenges. An evaluation study serves as a proof of concept for this framework, and demonstrates the potential benefits of implementing such a quality management scheme on top of current or future generations of mobile cellular networks.