A surrounding-adaptive QoE adjustment approach for optimization of capacity and quality of air interface

Recently, the evaluation on quality of the air interface in a wireless network has shifted from emphasis on QoS (quality of service) only to incorporation of QoE (quality of experience). However, it seems that QoE metrics have not been related to the surroundings of the served users so far, which may have a great influence on users' expected QoE. For instance, with a high level of QoS, a user's expectation of QoE could still be terrible because of the serious interference from the surroundings such as noise, ambient light or shaking of terminals due to mobility. From another perspective, it means that in such a case a high level of QoS may be helpless to enhance users' QoE and the requirement could be relaxed accordingly. In this paper, an approach called surrounding-adaptive QoE adjustment (SAQA) is proposed to optimize the capacity and the quality of air interface with voice service as an example. The basic idea of the approach is that user equipment (UE) detects the surroundings interference which may impact users' QoE and then adjusts QoS according to the detected results: a lower level of QoS is chosen in a bad environment to enhance the capacity, while a higher level of QoS is selected to guarantee the users' QoE in a better circumstance. Simulation results show that this method can remarkably enhance the voice capacity of the communication systems as well as guarantee users' QoE.