Enhancing Quality of Experience in Next Generation Networks Through Network Selection Mechanisms

The evolution of telecommunications during the last decades has been enormous and as a result, nowadays, people find themselves before the challenge of 4G networks. Consequently, network selection techniques play a vital role in ensuring quality of experience (QoE) in heterogeneous networks. The main scope of this paper is the development of a process in order to compare packet-switched networks in terms of QoE offered and finally select the network that offers the highest standard of QoE. For this reason, main QoS parameters are identified and a scheme is proposed to identify each parameter´s importance based on network performance. The proposed methodology combines the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to decide the relative weights of evaluative criteria set according to the network´s performance, as well as the grey relational analysis (GRA) to rank the network alternatives. The proposed methodology is then applied for GPRS and WLAN.