QoE-aware vertical handover in wireless heterogeneous networks

Deployment of next-generation network (4G) begins to spread throughout the world. With variety of network technologies and QoS restrictions on emerging applications; it becomes difficult for a user to select the best access network to request for connection. Even though many schemes have been proposed in the literature but very few of them take into account quality of experience (QoE) perceived by user for making decision. As QoE represents perception experienced by the user, it is thus an essential indicator for network evaluation, especially with multimedia communications nowadays. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel network selection mechanism that takes quality of experience into consideration for decision making. It is a user-baaed and network-assisted approach thus a compromise solution between user and network benefit. The main idea is to use quality of experience of ongoing users in candidate networks as an indicator to select the best network for connection. We have implemented and tested our mechanism in network simulator NS-2. The obtained results illustrate that with a QoE-aware mechanism we can significantly improve user experience of mobile node and load balancing between networks.