Analytic Hierarchy Process for Qos Evaluation of Mobile Data Networks

Abstract

The widespread demand for data applications over mobile networks requires that service providers guarantee a well-defined quality of service (QoS) for subscribers. Evaluating the QoS provided by service providers within a geographical area to determine which network provides the best QoS is a challenging task. The complex nature of mobile networks with multi-criteria and conflicting factors makes good decision making difficult. This paper presents a measurement-based method called Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for evaluating QoS in application-specific and user-centric data on 3G mobile networks. The evaluation problem is formulated as a multi-criteria decision problem. Latency, jitter, data loss, and throughput are the parameters collected as criteria in drive testing over the mobile network. Decision matrix is applied to solve the problem by reaching a final ranking of the network based on the collected measured values of the problem parameters. A case study of 3G mobile networks in Uyo metropolis is used to show how this approach can be effective in ranking the QoS in data applications to determine which network provides the best QoS based on users' perception of quality. The implemented results in Java indicate that Etisalat network is the alternative that offers the best QoS for web browsing application based on measured criteria. This is followed by Airtel and then MTN, while Glo is ranked least. The result provides useful information to decision makers for performance improvement on service quality. KEYWORDS Quality of service, multi-criteria decision making, analytic hierarchy process, web browsing & mobile networks 1.INTRODUCTION One of the objectives of wireless mobile networks is the provision of required quality of service (QoS). Whether the QoS level is measured from the end-users' experience or obtained from the network's switching centre, its aim is to improve subscribers' loyalty to a particular brand of service provider as well as yield more revenue to the operator. According to [1] and [2], enhancements in the form of higher data rates, QoS, security measures, location-awareness, new flexible communication capabilities, etc. are needed to enable wireless networks support demands for voice, data, and multimedia services. With the continuous growth in data rates, operators are forced to more-intelligently manage the traffic on their networks. Since different applications have different QoS requirements, efficient mechanisms (admission control, resource reservation, and packet scheduling) are needed to provide guaranteed QoS. In [3], the network-centric and end-system based approaches are proposed to support QoS guarantees. The former requires network devices such as routers, switches, and base stations to provide QoS support to satisfy data rate, bounded delay, and packet loss requirements by applications [4][5] while the latter does not impose any requirements on the network. Instead, control techniques are employed by the end systems to maximize the quality demanded by applications.