Improving the QoE of mobile data access for long-lived connections in cellular networks

Mobile applications are dominant in today´s cellular networks (Mobile Internet), which demand frequent and intensive mobile data access services. Popular applications like instant message and social network apps require a long-lived connection to the backend server which periodically sends small “keep-alive” messages to maintain the connected app session. Existing research has revealed that the keep-alive messages degrade the quality of experience (QoE) for both the client-user and the service provider in cellular network (e.g., to reduce the battery life for users´ phones, and to increase the cost of signaling and the channel overhead for service providers). In this paper, we present MobileQoE, a framework that improves the QoE of mobile data access in cellular networks. Specifically, MobileQoE consists of three components: (1) a unified definition of the radio resource cost of the keep-alive message; (2) a measurement approach for observing the cost of cellular radio resources consumed by keep-alive messages; (3) and a developed MobileQoE Software Development Kit (SDK) for android smartphones which can coordinate with different long-lived connections to reduce the total radio resource.