Impact of QoE related schedulers on 4G mobile network

Abstract: Following the rapid development of mobile infrastructure and hand-held user devices like smartphones and tablets, the way that mobile networks have been utilized has changed accordingly. Users are no longer using their phones just to talk to and message each other, but have migrated most of their multimedia consumption to these devices. The increased network strain and reduced profit margins that new services bring to the table might lead to future decoupling between revenues and expenses in the network. In order to avoid this scenario various different strategies have been proposed and one of them is introduction of QoS/QoE related resource allocation techniques. This thesis looks at Interruption Prediction scheduler which tries to predict and prevent audio or video interruptions experienced during video conference call. In order to test the performance of these schedulers, MATLAB simulator reusing some of the functions from RUNE toolbox has been used. Results of the newly presented algorithms are compared with a QoE/QoS agnostic scheduler. Unfortunately results of these schedulers in the case of video conference are not as promising as they were in the case of some other types of services. The research done shows that these modifications of the scheduling algorithms do not help to increase the network performance in terms of observed KPIs (Total Time of Interruptions, Frequency of Interruptions and network throughput) in most of the described scenarios. However, there are some special scenarios when these schedulers show a certain potential.