Handset and network quality performance benchmarking for QoE improvement

Quality of Experience (QoE) is the subjective measurement of the quality of a telecommunication service perceived by the user. Overall acceptability may be influenced by user expectations and context, and QoE includes complete end-to-end system effects. Radio access network quality measurements are usually enough to evaluate the user experience of voice services. In addition, the customer satisfaction of the packet data services also depends on the type of the user equipment (UE) and on the multimedia content characteristics. To evaluate the QoE, the paper analyzes the behavior of different types of user equipments related to voice and packet data traffic statistics on the radio access network by Telecom Italia. The analysis of some suitable Key Performance Indicators is shown. The performance of different user equipment types are monitored by joining the dropped call events with the radio link conditions, in terms of signal quality, signal strength, distance of mobile equipment from the serving cell. The relation of packet loss rate, latency and network quality are also evaluated with respect to the different user equipment categories analyzed (e.g. handset, smartphone, USB Modem, tablet) for data services based on the transmission control protocol (TCP). The results show that mobile terminals behave very differently from each other, affecting both the amount of voice dropped calls and packet data retransmission in different radio link conditions and consequently the user quality of experience.