Provisioning Quality of Experience in 6G Networks

Technology innovation for the sixth generation (6G) era should focus on improving quality of life by addressing societal needs, advancing human experience with the fusion of digital and physical worlds, and achieving a sustainable well-being. The 6G networks are expected to bring higher capacity and coverage combined with dependable real-time properties but must additionally be able to control the balance between quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE). QoS is the ability to offer reliable performance to connect people and things. QoE is a way to measure the quality of a service as perceived by the end-user, enabling a more customer-centric network design approach for end-user services. To provide excellent QoS, accurate estimation of QoE and corrective measures to adapt QoS to maintain acceptable QoE from the end-user perspective will be needed. In this paper, we propose a linear weighted QoE model in terms of mean opinion score (MOS) and the ability to adapt QoS. We further validate our model with a QoE impairment model and analyze the results with respect to the latency and bit rate metrics, which are critical for our target use case of Virtual Reality (VR) gaming. We also propose to use the QoE model to enable adaptive QoS in the 6G radio access network (RAN), including dynamic learning of QoS metrics.