List of joint PhD thesis supervision

Natalia Vassilieva

Supervisors: Prof. Francisco Barcelo (UPC, Spain) and Prof. Yevgeni Koucheryavy (Tampere University of Technology, Finland)

Expected graduation: Summer 2011

Vitor Bernardo

Supervisors: Prof. Torsten Braun (University of Bern, Switzerland) and Prof. Marilia Curado (University of Coimbra, Portugal)

Next Generation Networks will encompass a considerable number of wireless devices moving with different patterns, speeds and communicating through various radio interfaces. The number of different wireless access technologies is also growing, and as a result, there is a need to support seamless vertical handovers within heterogeneous networks.

Besides the very fast development of wireless broadband services anytime and anywhere, the new applications' requirements create the need to provide better experience to the end-users based on the perceived quality. This leads to a number of significant research challenges in the area.

This PhD work aims to propose an architecture able to support the proper Quality of Experience (QoE) encompassing the signalling and storage in heterogeneous networks, and a novel metric, named VoES (Value of End-user Satisfaction), which will comprise the QoE perceived by the end-user, plus a set of lower level indicators and end-user preferences.