Benefits of mobile end user network switching and multihoming

Abstract

Mobile users have not been able to exploit spatio-temporal differences between individual mobile networks operators for a variety of reasons. End user network switching and multihoming are two promising mechanisms that could allow such exploitation. However these mechanisms have not been thoroughly explored at a general system level with QoE metrics. Therefore, in this work we analyze these mechanisms in a variety of diverse scenarios through a system level model based on an agent based modeling framework.In terms of results, we find that in all scenarios end user network switching provides significant benefits in terms of both throughput and mean opinion score as the number of available networks increases. However, contrastingly, end user multihoming in most scenarios does not provide significant benefits over network switching given the same number of available networks. The major reason is inefficient radio resource allocation resulting from individual networks not taking the multihoming nature of end users into account. Though, in low user density situations this inefficiency is not a problem and multihoming does provide increased throughput though not increased mean opinion scores. Finally, scenarios that vary the fraction of users adopting multihoming suggests that both early and late adopters will have similar gains over users not adopting multihoming. Thus the adoption dynamics of multihoming appear favorable. Overall, the results support the applicability of end user network switching for improving mobile user experience and the applicability of end user multihoming in more limited situations. (A. Basaure)1 The currently high switching costs (enabled by the entrenched MNO model in many countries) result in users switching MNOs at a timescale of years. This switching frequency is orders of magnitude too slow to significantly exploit the spatiotemporal differences between mobile networks.Given this operator resistance, mechanisms that do not require operator support are particularly interesting. In that vein, end user network switching is a mechanism that does not require operator support because the network switching is assumed to occur completely on the end user device. In addition, the related mechanism of end user multihoming (an end user transmitting over several networks simultaneously and thus aggregating capacity) does not require operator support given a higher layer multipath protocol such as MPTCP. The two mechanisms are fully defined in Section 2.1.Given the potential of these mechanisms, a key driver for spurring adoption is understanding the scenarios in which these mechanisms will benefit users and whether the actual user benefit is substantial. However, prior work [1,2,3,4] on these mechanisms has primarily focused on low level technical implementations rather than higher level system analyses. Furthermore, these technical works have not applied user-centric QoE metrics such as mean opinion score (MOS) in their analyses. Therefore, in this work we examine these two mechanisms through a syst...

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