The paper "Impact of WiFi Offloading on Video Streaming QoE in Urban Environments" by Valentin Burger, Michael Seufert, Fabian Kaup, Matthias Wichtlhuber, David Hausheer, and Phuoc Tran-Gia was accepted for publication at the IEEE Workshop on Quality of Experience-based Management for Future Internet Applications and Services (QoE-FI) on June 12, 2015 in London (co-located with IEEE ICC 2015).


Abstract:
Video streaming is the most popular application in today's mobile Internet and its growing demands and popularity put more and more load on cellular networks. In a recent trend to mitigate the cellular load, followed by many providers, users are offered to offload mobile connections to WiFi hotspots, which are predominately deployed in urban environments. In this work, we conduct a simulative performance evaluation of the impact of WiFi offloading on the Quality of Experience (QoE) of video streaming. The evaluation is based on connectivity measurements from a German city and uses a simple QoE model for estimating the perceived quality of video streaming. Our findings show that, despite its benefits for operators, offloading to WiFi has a negative impact on video streaming QoE for some users when 3G/4G coverage is available. Only in the case of 2G coverage, WiFi offloading can significantly improve the perceived quality for users.

Paper: