Work-in-Progress: An Empirical Study of the Joint Effects of WiFi Coverage and Channel Congestion on Quality of Experience in 5 GHz Band

Ever-increasing multimedia application usage brings stricter network requirements every day for wireless networks. WiFi is the commonly used wireless technology for in-home and public networks. Existing literature focuses mainly on video streaming QoE over WiFi against channel congestion. None of the studies investigates the joint effects of coverage and congestion issues on the QoE of different multimedia applications with different network requirements and adoption rates. In this study, first time in the literature, QoE of video conferencing, YouTube video streaming, cloud gaming, and VR streaming applications are investigated under different congestion and coverage scenarios in the 5 GHz WiFi band, taking into account the different adoption rates of the applications. The results show that high congestion can prevent a single user from streaming a 4K video, even when the user is in a medium coverage region. On the other hand, the QoE of cloud gaming, and especially VR streaming, are more to the congestion and coverage issues. For better user experience in multimedia applications with more demands, e.g., VR streaming, the new 6 GHz WiFi band could be a solution in near future.