Working to improve the quality of experience for mobile content

Where are you from and where did you study before coming to KTH?

– I am from Colombia and received my master degree at National University of Colombia.

What is your topic and why did you choose it?

– My topic is the design of Quality of Experience (QoE)-based resource management systems for mobile infrastructures. With the traffic-tsunami and the growing interest in mobile content, one of the industry goals is to deliver content with the best quality possible while managing the network resources in the more efficient way. My intention is to present a proposal that brings us closer to solve this challenge.

Describe your topic in short.

– Nowadays, networks deliver more and more content, especially video. When you watch a video it is important to have a smooth playback, with no interruptions and good resolution. If the interruptions are so often that you get annoyed by them, probably your first reaction will be stopping the video and blame your terminal, your network provider or the content server (if not your family, friends or boss) for such a bad experience. You always want good quality.Although operators and content providers do their best to provide you a good experience, the infrastructure is not completely aware about what you perceive in your terminal. For instance, they do not know how many interruptions you have experienced playing a video. We say: Look, the infrastructure can be aware about what is happening in your terminal (and can affect your mood) while you consume a content, so let the network use this information to distribute its resources in a way user’s can be satisfied. Perhaps some users need more attention than others, and the network can prioritize the resource management according to this criterion.

Tell me something about your results.

-So far we have proposed an architecture that incorporates the user’s QoE evaluation in the resource management. In the same work, we presented some resource management schedulers that take advantage of the proposed architecture and reduce the interruptions perceived by video users. These results show that there is a promising area, where incorporating QoE evaluation to the resource management can help to improve network resources utilization.

What will the future bring for your research, how will you continue and what focus will you have on your PhD thesis?

– It is important to extend our analysis to a multi base station scenario, considering at the same time how we can impact the energy consumption by implementing QoE-based resource management in mobile networks. A future step will also involve a techno-economic analysis of the impact of the proposed solution in the mobile networks deployment.

The thesis by Luis Guillermo Martinez Ballesteros can be found here .