User in the loop: QoE-oriented optimization in communication and networks

Improving users' quality of experience (QoE) has become a consensus in wireless communications. Although the wireless network technology keeps evolving from 3G to 4G and the foreseeable 5G, QoE assurance in service provisioning is still a challenging task, partly due to the complicated mechanism in optimizing QoE. In this paper, we present a concept of QoE-oriented optimization for resource allocation and network configuration (RA-NC) in communications and networks. The QoE-oriented optimization is not a simple change in optimization goal from QoS to QoE of traditional QoS-oriented optimization, but a systematic rethink on the impacts of QoE on RA-NC problem. First, we introduce the main idea of QoE-oriented optimization from the perspective of RA-NC optimization modeling. Then, detailed principles, requirements and challenges are explained for QoE-oriented optimization. Finally, we envision an end-to-end QoE optimization framework, where the smartphone explores real-time users' QoE feedback data captured by sensors to improve user's QoE in an online, model-freed manner.