Impact of WiFi offloading on video streaming QoE in urban environments

Abstract

Video streaming is the most popular application in today's mobile Internet and its growing demands and popularity put more and more load on cellular networks. In a recent trend to mitigate the cellular load, followed by many providers, users are offered to offload mobile connections to WiFi hotspots, which are predominately deployed in urban environments. In this work, we conduct a simulative performance evaluation of the impact of WiFi offloading on the Quality of Experience (QoE) of video streaming. The evaluation is based on connectivity measurements from a German city and uses a simple QoE model for estimating the perceived quality of video streaming. Our findings show that, despite its benefits for operators, offloading to WiFi has a negative impact on video streaming QoE for some users when 3G/4G coverage is available. Only in the case of 2G coverage, WiFi offloading can significantly improve the perceived quality for users.

Quality of experience and access network traffic management of HTTP adaptive video streaming

“…The simulation framework was rst applied to evaluate Wi-Fi o oading for classical video streaming, i.e., video streaming without adaptation. The results, which are described in [44,47], showed that the QoE and energy consumption were slightly worse if the ow was o oaded to public Wi-Fi hotspots due to lower throughput compared to 3G and 4G. The following evaluation uses the same approach and simulation framework, but investigates the performance of Wi-Fi o oading for HAS, thereby considering both o oading to public and private Wi-Fi hotspots.…”

“…Afterwards, the focus is on Wi-Fi o oading as a SATM mechanism, which is not only widely considered by ISPs to reduce the load on stressed mobile access networks, but is also well suited in the home environment due to the prevalence of residential Wi-Fi networks. This thesis presents a hotspot location model for public Wi-Fi o oading [10], a SATM system for private Wi-Fi o oading in home environments [42,56], and a performance evaluation on the QoE end energy e ciency of public and private Wi-Fi o oading of HAS ows [29,44,47].…”

“…Moreover, it describes a collaborative SATM platform for HAS on residential Wi-Fi routers based on [42,56], which supports private Wi-Fi o oading, as well as the distribution and caching of niche content. A performance evaluation of the gain of Wi-Fi o oading for HAS is conducted in Section 4.3 based on [29,44,47], and the applicability of the simple hotspot location model is investigated. Finally, Section 4.4 integrates the ndings of this chapter.…”

“…This section describes the performance evaluation of Wi-Fi o oading for HAS based on [29,44,47]. Thereby, mobile video streaming sessions are simulated in a city, which can be o oaded if shared Wi-Fi access points are in range, otherwise they are served in a mobile network.…”

Development of Wireless LAN Base Station with QoS Control Based on Web‐QoE by Bandwidth Control and Priority Control

“…Besides, we developed a wireless LAN base station with QoS control that reduces congestion while preventing decline in QoE of Web services (Web‐QoE) in a wireless LAN. In addition to the previous research , there are also a few other studies on QoE in wireless LANs . Literature proposes a method using a proper selection of Wi‐Fi networks based on QoE.…”