Quality of experience based resource sharing in IEEE 802.11e HCCA

When dealing with multiple traffic classes, it is often difficult to define a single resource sharing criterion. For instance, VoIP flows require low delay and losses, whereas FTP traffic requires high throughput. In this paper, we propose to use the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) as a unifying criterion, and to share resources so as to keep the MOS of the various flows above an acceptable threshold whenever possible. We present four different resource sharing policies: Preemptive, Non-preemptive, MOS-driven Fairness and Revenue Optimization. We analyze the different approaches through simulation, comparing their performance in terms of end-user Quality of Experience and revenue. Our results show that our scheme reacts to the changing traffic scenarios so as to achieve the pre-specified objective, thus achieving an effective exploitation of the limited bandwidth resources.