Addressing traffic demanding scenarios in cellular networks through QoE-based rate adaptation

Currently, cellular networks are evolving towards providing high quality mobile services in a ubiquitous manner. In this direction, increased robustness is required to face fluctuations at the service quality that follow traffic demanding events, such as an earthquake or a blackout. Dealing with this challenge, we propose a cross-layer scheme, which handles the traffic changes by adjusting dynamically the encoding rate at the application layer. The rate adjustments target at controlling the impact on the provided Quality of Experience (QoE), i.e., the key metric for assessing the perceptual quality of a provided service. The performance analysis conducted revealed a smooth QoE adaptation to traffic changes with quite low signaling cost for the exchange of the rate adaptation commands.