  Mobile users have not been able to exploit spatio-temporal differences
between individual mobile networks operators for a variety of reasons. End user
network switching and multihoming are two promising mechanisms that could allow
such exploitation. However these mechanisms have not been thoroughly explored
at a general system level with QoE metrics. Therefore, in this work we analyze
these mechanisms in a variety of diverse scenarios through a system level model
based on an agent based modeling framework. In terms of results, we find that
in all scenarios end user network switching provides significant benefits in
terms of both throughput and mean opinion score as the number of available
networks increases. However, contrastingly, end user multihoming in most
scenarios does not provide significant benefits over network switching given
the same number of available networks. The major reason is inefficient radio
resource allocation resulting from individual networks not taking the
multihoming nature of end users into account. Though, in low user density
situations this inefficiency is not a problem and multihoming does provide
increased throughput though not increased mean opinion scores. Finally,
scenarios that vary the fraction of users adopting multihoming suggests that
both early and late adopters will have similar gains over users not adopting
multihoming. Thus the adoption dynamics of multihoming appear favorable.
Overall, the results support the applicability of end user network switching
for improving mobile user experience and the applicability of end user
multihoming in more limited situations.
