Incentive structures against QoE misrepresentation

Design incentive structures that discourage video applications from misrepresenting their QoE or spatial complexity to obtain disproportionate cellular network resources.

Background

QoE-aware resource allocation creates a strategic incentive for applications to report artificially high complexity or otherwise misrepresent QoE and compliance with network guidance in order to receive more resources. The paper notes that trusted software components could provide a technical mitigation, but this does not resolve the underlying economic-incentive problem.

The conclusion explicitly lists incentive structures that prevent such misrepresentation as a remaining open challenge, leaving the appropriate mechanism for aligning application behavior with truthful reporting unresolved.

References

Key open challenges remain: runtime estimation of the spatial complexity curve from limited observations, session-level QoE models that capture the temporal effects of quality transitions, privacy-preserving mechanisms for sharing spatial complexity information, and incentive structures that discourage applications from misrepresenting their QoE to gain resource advantages.

— Prototyping QoE-Aware Rate Adaptation in Cellular Networks with Commercial Applications  (2609.09490 - Nádas et al., 8 Sep 2026) in Section VI, “Conclusion”