QoE-Aware Resource Allocation for Profit Maximization Under User Satisfaction Guarantees in HetNets With Differentiated Services

Abstract

The rise of third-party content providers and the introduction of numerous applications have been driving the growth of mobile data traffic in the past few years. The applications’ various quality of service requirements as well as the use of multiple devices per user have increased the traffic heterogeneity, pressing the telecommunications industry to the deployment of dense heterogeneous networks (HetNets). At the same time, the rise of the content providers has also led to the decrease of the mobile network operators’ (MNOs) revenues. Under these circumstances, the MNOs need to guarantee the users’ quality of experience (QoE) requirements, while ensuring the sustainability of HetNet investments. To this end, we consider a HetNet deployment where MNOs offer a multitude of services with diverse pricing. We propose a heuristic, greedy, and QoE-aware resource allocation algorithm with fairness and overall user satisfaction constraints to maximize the MNO profit, while providing high QoE. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can handle traffic heterogeneity by achieving substantial profit and QoE gains, compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.