MNO-OTT Collaborative Video Streaming in 5G: The Zero-Rated QoE Approach for Quality and Resource Management

The Quality of Experience (QoE) management procedures for multimedia services benefit from an effective collaboration between the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and the Over-The-Top (OTT) service providers as the former can allocate the appropriate network resources to the users and the latter has access to key influence factors for having a proper view of the provided QoE. One successful collaboration model is the zero-rated data rate approach, according to which the MNO limits the data rate of the users towards the collaborating OTT applications with the benefit for the user that the generated traffic is not counted in her monthly contract data limit. Accordingly, the MNO may reduce the network congestion, and the users are encouraged to select the collaborating OTT applications. Though, this approach does not consider the resulting QoE, which may vary significantly from one user to another even if the same throughput is given. Based on this consideration, in this paper, we proposed the zero-rated QoE approach, according to which the limit is introduced in terms of QoE rather than throughput. This clearly requires a stronger collaboration between the OTT and the MNO, as the first has to give access to the second to quality influence factors and the latter to allocate resources according to the predicted QoE. The contributions of this paper are: the introduction of the novel zero-rated QoE approach with particular reference to video streaming services; the definition of novel components in the 3GPP architecture so that this approach can be introduced; the definition of the algorithm for the allocation of the appropriate radio resources to each user; a simulation analysis where the proposed approach is compared with respect to the former zero-rated approach, which shows significant improvements in terms of average provided quality and quality fairness at the same overall throughput.