QoE‐based pseudo heartbeat message compression mechanism for future wireless network

Wireless multimedia services are increasingly becoming popular, which boosts the need for better quality‐of‐experience (QoE). However, there are many aspects leading to the degradation of real‐time video QoE, especially, a large number of always‐on‐line (AOL) applications existing in future wireless networks transmit heartbeat message periodically to keep always‐on, and hence induce heavy signaling costs and overload wireless networks. In this paper, we propose QoE‐based pseudo heartbeat message compression mechanism to reduce the number of signaling loads in the radio access network by intercepting the heartbeat message at a certain frequency in the proxy client. To maintain the protocol feature of the AOL applications, the heartbeat messages are reconstructed by the proxy server and sent to the application server. Furthermore, to analyze the influence of this mechanism on the video user, a new QoE perception model is proposed. Finally, combined the QoE perception model for video services with AOL services, the utility function for joint optimization multi‐services is developed to determine the optimum compression frequency. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism greatly alleviates the signaling load and leads to a significant performance improvement on the QoE of video users, while a slight decrease in the QoE of AOL users. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.