Network based QoE Optimization for "Over The Top" Services

Abstract

This report focuses on the quality aspects of media delivery over the Internet. Weinvestigate the constructs of Knowledge Plane, Monitor Plane and Action Planeas controlling functions for the Internet. Our goal is to implement functionality formonitoring services in a home network, allowing the router to reason and take actionsto obtain an optimal traffic situation based on user preferences. The actions takento alter ongoing traffic are implemented in a modular router framework called Click.We will use this router to affect the media stream TCP connections into behavingin accordance with the networks optimal state. New features are implemented tocomplement the functionality found in Click, giving us the tools needed to obtainthe wanted results.Our focus is on adaptive video streaming in general and Silverlight SmoothStreaming in particular. Using custom Silverlight client code, we implemented asolution which allows the applications to report usage statistics to the home gateway.This information will be used by the home gateway to obtain an overview of traffic inthe network. Presenting this information to the user, we retrieve the user preferencesfor the given video streams. The router then dynamically reconfigures itself, andstarts altering TCP packets to obtain an optimal flow of traffic in the home network.Our system has been implemented on a Linux PC where it runs in its currentform. All the different areas of the solution, ranging from the clients, router, Knowl-edge Plane and traffic manipulation elements are put together. They form a workingsystem for QoE/QoS optimization which we have tested and demonstrated. In ad-dition to testing the concept on our own streaming services, the reporting featurefor Silverlight clients has also been implemented in a private build of TV2 Sumo.This is the Internet service of the largest commercial television station in Norway.Further testing with the TV2 Sumo client has given promising results. The systemis working as it is, although we would like to see more complex action reasoning toimprove convergence time for achieving the correct bit rate.