Band Steering Technology Based on QoE-Oriented Optimization in Wireless Network

Abstract

In mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) network, it is necessary to reduce the cost of sensing data transformation from mobile devices to the MCS platform in the core of the network. With the widespread deployment of access point (AP), explosive data traffic of the mobile devices is offloaded from cellular base stations to Wi-Fi networks. The congestion of the 2.4 GHz band in dual-band wireless area network makes the lower quality of experience (QoE) of users. To ease the load of 2.4 GHz band, the band-steering technology has been widely used by equipment manufacturers. However, the fixed threshold configuration strategy in band steering technology makes it easy to be exploited by setting up a great number of connection requirements in a short time, which may prevent a normal connection requirement of a user, making it difficult to satisfy the dynamic resource requirements of different services. Moreover, if the threshold is configured too high, it may result in QoE imbalance in dual bands. Besides, when the band (such as 2.4 GHz) resources cannot meet the terminal requirement, the terminal cannot autonomously switch to another band (such as 5 GHz), and this may result in a very poor QoE of users. In this paper, a secure QoE-oriented wireless network optimization framework is proposed to improve the QoE of users in dual-band network. Firstly, to ensure the overall QoE of network and balancing the QoE between 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands, the framework dynamically adjusts the load threshold of the frequency band based on QoE information during the association of a terminal. Secondly, to meet the basic QoE requirement of each user, the framework preferentially switches the terminals with poor QoE to the idle band after users join the network. The experimental results show that the proposed framework can improve the QoE both before and after the terminal accesses the network. Additionally, it enables the better QoE balance in dual bands.