This paper highlights the vision of CASPER project towards user-centric network and service management in future mobile networks. Putting the end-users of the network at the epicenter of the service provisioning process, CASPER builds on top of the Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) advances a middleware architecture which will realize user-centric orchestration of service and network functions. User centricity will be leveraged through a Quality of Experience-oriented framework, composed of three modular functions, namely the QoE monitoring and estimation, the QoE service and network management, and the QoE control interface. QoE-Controller. Actually, it is the interface between the central entity and the underlying network. It performs the exchange of information in both directions. More specifically, it requests and collects feedback from appropriate data sources (arrows (1) and (2) in Fig.4) and it applies any QoE-aware control decisions back to the network (arrow (6) in Fig.4). It also provides input of interest both to the QoE-Monitor and the QoE-Manager (arrows (3a) and (3b) in Fig. 4). In the communication with the QoE-Monitor, the QoE-Controller offers QoE-input data on a per flow basis, while in the communication with the QoE-Manager, it sends information regarding the current network state (e.g., availability of resources, performance statistics etc.).
QoE-Monitor.This building block performs the estimation of the QoE and reports the results to the QoE-Manager (arrow (4) in Fig.4). To be more preicise, the QoE-Monitor initially performs traffic classification using statistical analysis [13] to deduce the type of traffic of the considered flow. Then, it exploits built-in QoE assessment functions a.k.a QoE estimation models. Depending on the identified traffic type, the proper QoE estimation model is selected, followed by an estimation of the QoE. It needs to be noted, that all available QoE models can be integrated offline into the QoE-Monitor by the operators, namely during the design phase of the central QoE management entity and prior to its real-time operation, which makes the original selection of QoE models very crucial.QoE-Manager. This entity is responsible for conducting any type of CEM (arrow (5a) in Fig. 4) or QoE-aware network management (arrow (5b) in Fig. 4). It exploits input from the QoE-Controller regarding the current network state and estimated QoE scores from the QoE-Monitor. Additionally, it considers network policies or Service Level Agreements to decide and command measures that need to be imposed to the network for solving quality problems at hand. Decisions can be taken per flow or catholically, respecting user policies (e.g., subscription profile, charging information, etc.) and current network constraints (e.g., availability in resources). As mentioned in the description of the QoE-Controller entity, the adaptation/control actions that realize these decisions are applied to the network through the QoE-Controller. However, the QoE-M...