QoE-Aware Analysis and Management of Multimedia Services in 5G and Beyond Heterogeneous Networks

The explosion of mobile applications and phenomenal adoption of mobile connectivity by end-users has generated an increasing amount of mobile data traffic. Application posing stringent network requirements of high bandwidth and low latency (e.g., immersive videos) and the substantial amount of data traffic has put tremendous pressure on existing network infrastructures. Cognizant of the need of increasing network capacity, the simultaneous use of heterogeneous network technologies (HetNet) has been proposed to address this imperative problem. 5G is expected to further drive the concept of HetNet by allowing the use of huge available bandwidth at milli-meter wave frequencies. While HetNet concentrates on improving network capacity from the data transmission perspective, it overlooks the importance of enhancing the support of user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) for the evolving new services. There is a wide range of factors influencing user’s QoE, such as network performance including delay, jitter and throughput, contextual influence such as personalized content delivery, mobility aware content caching and dissemination, and human impact such as human roles and demographic attributes. This paper initially presents a QoE-centric analysis, and evaluation of multimedia services over 5G networks. Then, to address the shortcomings of existing mobile networks, we propose a framework to enhance the support of QoE, to enable smooth delivery of personalized immersive video environment and personalized interaction with an immersive video, anywhere, anytime and on any device. Finally, we propose new solutions to achieve practically feasible spectrum allocation and personalized content caching and dissemination, to provide uninterrupted multimedia services to end-users.