QoS analysis and evaluations: Improving cellular-based distance education

Mobile broadband technologies are now an important part of the communication infrastructure even for most of the developing world. These technologies can potentially play an important role in improving the socioeconomic status of rural areas. However, adaptation of these technologies for provision of relevant multimedia services faces major challenges. Perhaps, Quality of Service (QoS) issues still tops the list of such challenges. In this work we study how to evaluate the QoS of cellular-based systems focusing on an application perspective. We quantify the QoS levels for different traffic models using application and network related parameters to identify the most suitable configuration for running multimedia-based services. More specifically, our analysis is based on considering a unified measure combining key QoS metrics such as packet loss, and delay. For evaluation purposes, we also investigate the QoS issues of deploying a distance education platform running over UMTS cellular systems. The QoS issues related to the deployment of multimedia services in cellular technologies are then considered and analyzed in detail through simulation studies. The results show that by inclusion of the communication technology and application related parameters along with the number of users in QoS evaluations, better performing network configurations can be readily selected. This is achieved, through our proposed application-based QoS evaluation scheme that is based on combining various related measures. The proposed scheme is shown to be particularly beneficial for evaluating and improving QoS for multimedia-based heterogeneous networks.