Enhancing Quality of Experience in Next Generation Networks Through Network Selection Mechanisms

The evolution of telecommunications during the last decades has been enormous and as a result, nowadays, people find themselves before the challenge of 4G networks. Consequently, network selection techniques play a vital role in ensuring quality of experience (QoE) in heterogeneous networks. The main scope of this paper is the development of a process in order to compare packet-switched networks in terms of QoE offered and finally select the network that offers the highest standard of QoE. For this reason, main QoS parameters are identified and a scheme is proposed to identify each parameter's importance based on network performance. The proposed methodology combines the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to decide the relative weights of evaluative criteria set according to the network's performance, as well as the grey relational analysis (GRA) to rank the network alternatives. The proposed methodology is then applied for GPRS and WLAN.