Improving the QoE of mobile data access for long-lived connections in cellular networks

Mobile applications are dominant in today's cellular networks (Mobile Internet), which demand frequent and intensive mobile data access services. Popular applications like instant message and social network apps require a long-lived connection to the backend server which periodically sends small 'keep-alive' messages to maintain the connected app session. Existing research has revealed that the keep-alive messages degrade the quality of experience (QoE) for both the client-user and the service provider in cellular network (e.g., to reduce the battery life for users' phones, and to increase the cost of signaling and the channel overhead for service providers). In this paper, we present MobileQoE, a framework that improves the QoE of mobile data access in cellular networks. Specifically, MobileQoE consists of three components: (1) a unified definition of the radio resource cost of the keep-alive message; (2) a measurement approach for observing the cost of cellular radio resources consumed by keep-alive messages; (3) and a developed MobileQoE Software Development Kit (SDK) for android smartphones which can coordinate with different long-lived connections to reduce the total radio resource. ? 2015 IEEE.EI456-4612015-Augus