Qoe-Centric Mobile Operating System Design (Poster)

Current operating systems are already proficient at managing certain system resources, such as the CPU, memory, and disk. But on interactive mobile devices, users care more about resources such as time, battery life, and money, that are unmanaged or poorly managed by today’s smartphone platforms. When apps slow down our typing, they waste our time. When apps download unnecessary resources, they waste battery life and potentially money, if using a metered data plan. It is the degree to which mobile devices effectively manage these human-facing resources that determines a user’s quality of experience (QoE), and it is QoE which should drive not just policy, but decisions on mobile devices.

While modern operating systems such as Android make decisions based on policies meant to improve QoE, it is unclear that these static policies always result in the right decisions. To remedy this, we propose designing QoE-centric mobile operating systems that use QoE as input to drive resource allocation decisions.