QoE oriented cross-layer design of a resource allocation algorithm in beyond 3G systems

Abstract__The provision of high speed access to Internet and
IP-based services is one of the main goals of beyond 3G (B3G)
wireless systems. These systems will benefit from cross-layer
protocol designs that will introduce interactions between different
layers to obtain performance gains. The majority of the research in the

field of cross-layer in B3G systems aims at improving quality of service
(QoS) system centric metrics such as spectral efficiency, service latency,
delay variation (jitter), etc. However, minor attention has been paid to the
satisfaction of the subjective quality requirements from human users.
With the goal of incorporating the subjective human perception into
the cross-layer design of B3G systems, this work carries out an experimental
survey of the sensitivity of the user subjective quality to the service response
time for the Web browsing application. From the experimental results,
a mapping from service response time and user data rate (provided by
the wireless link) to mean opinion score (MOS) is derived. The presented
results will show that the Web page size plays an important role in
the mapping function. The derived mapping function is incorporated into
a radio resource allocation algorithm for orthogonal frequency division
multiple access (OFDMA) systems. This incorporation is carried out
maximizing the aggregate utility over all the users in the cell. Its performance
has been compared to that of the multicarrier proportional fair (MPF) under
heavy load conditions with a 3G LTE simulator. The results have shown that
the proposed methodology can provide an interesting enhancement of
the user experienced quality compared to the MPF algorithm.