Handset and Network Quality Performance Benchmarking for QoE Improvement

Quality of Experience (QoE) is the subjective measurement of the quality of a telecommunication service perceived by the user. Overall acceptability may be influenced by user expectations and context and QoE includes complete end-to-end system effects. Network quality measurements are enough to evaluate the user experience of voice services but the customer satisfaction of the data services also depends on the type of the user equipment (UE) and on the content providers efficiency. To evaluate the QoE the paper analyzes the behaviour of different types of terminals related to voice and data services statistics on the radio access network of Telecom Italia by a selection of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) . The performance of different mobile equipment types are monitored by joining the dropped call events with the radio link conditions, in terms of signal quality, signal strength, distance of mobile equipment from the serving cell. The relation of packet loss rate, latency and network quality are also evaluated respect to the different user equipments analyzed (e.g. handset, smartphone, USB Modem, tablet ) for data services based on the transmission control protocol (TCP). The results show that mobile equipments behave very differently from each other, affecting the amount of voice dropped calls and data retransmission in different radio link conditions and consequently the user quality experience.