Evaluation of the Profitability of Quality of Experience-based Resource Allocation Deployment in LTE Network : A Techno-economic Assessment based on Quality of Experience in Video Traffic

Sammanfattning: In the current mobile telecommunication market, with slow growth in mobile subscriptions and increasing traffi demand, each mobile operator needs to manage their customer loyalty in order to maintain position in the market. To retain their customer's loyalty, the user quality of satisfaction needs to be preserved. Integrating a Quality of Experience (QoE) approach into a radio resource scheduling scheme can be a means to improve user quality of satisfaction to a service. However, the enhancement of existing resource allocation management to support a QoE-based resource scheduling scheme needs a careful consideration since it will impact the mobile operator's investment cost. A profitability assessment of QoE-based resource allocation is required as a basis for the mobile operator to forecast their potential benefit of QoE-based resource scheduling deployment. This thesis investigated the profitability of deploying QoE-based radio resource management (RRM) in terms of revenue loss compared to proportional fair (PF) scheduling, a widely used resource allocation scheme, in delivering a streaming video service. In QoE-based RRM, a buffering percentage experienced by a user was considered in the resource allocation decision process. The two scheduling schemes were simulated in different network configurations. User satisfaction was quantified in terms of mean opinion score. Given the degree of satisfaction for each user, a number of users who would be likely to churn was obtained. A cost-benefit assessment was then conducted by predicting revenue loss due to customer churn. The results from the simulation and cost analysis show that although QoE-based resource scheduling provides users with a higher degree of satisfaction for more base stations, the utilization of a QoE-based resource scheduler does not offer significant benefit to the network operator with regard to revenue loss and deployment cost when compared to a PF scheduler. This outcome indicates that if the business target is to reduce customer churn, then the operator should utilize a PF scheduler for their RRM scheme.