QoE-Centric Control and Management of Multimedia Services in Software Defined and Virtualized Networks

Multimedia services consumption has increased tremendously since the deployment of 4G/LTE networks. Mobile video services (e.g., YouTube and Mobile TV) on smart devices are expected to continue to grow with the emergence and evolution of future networks such as 5G. The end user’s demand for services with better quality from service providers has triggered a trend towards Quality of Experience (QoE) - centric network management through efficient utilization of network resources. However, existing network technologies are either unable to adapt to diverse changing network conditions or limited in available resources. This has posed challenges to service providers for provisioning of QoE-centric multimedia services. New networking solutions such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can provide better solutions in terms of QoE control and management of multimedia services in emerging and future networks. The features of SDN, such as adaptability, programmability and cost-effectiveness make it suitable for bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications such as live video streaming, 3D/HD video and video gaming. However, the delivery of multimedia services over SDN/NFV networks to achieve optimized QoE, and the overall QoE-centric network resource management remain an open question especially in the advent development of future softwarized networks. The work in this thesis intends to investigate, design and develop novel approaches for QoE-centric control and management of multimedia services (with a focus on video streaming services) over software defined and virtualized networks. First, a video quality management scheme based on the traffic intensity under Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming over HTTP (DASH) using SDN is developed. The proposed scheme can mitigate virtual port queue congestion which may cause buffering or stalling events during video streaming, thus, reducing the video quality. A QoE-driven resource allocation mechanism is designed and developed for improving the end user’s QoE for video streaming services. The aim of this approach is to find the best combination of network node functions that can provide an optimized QoE level to end-users through network node cooperation. Furthermore, a novel QoE-centric management scheme is proposed and developed, which utilizes Multipath TCP (MPTCP) and Segment Routing (SR) to enhance QoE for video streaming services over SDN/NFV-based networks. The goal of this strategy is to enable service providers to route network traffic through multiple disjointed bandwidth-satisfying paths and meet specific service QoE guarantees to the end-users. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed schemes in this work improve the video quality significantly compared with the state-of-the- art approaches. The thesis further proposes the path protections and link failure-free MPTCP/SR-based architecture that increases survivability, resilience, availability and robustness of future networks. The proposed path protection and dynamic link recovery scheme achieves a minimum time to recover from a failed link and avoids link congestion in softwarized networks

Exploring MultiPath TCP Through Discrete Event Simulation

Postponed access: the file will be accessible after 2022-06-01Global internet usage is rapidly becoming more mobile. Devices are, as a consequence, equipped with multiple network interfaces to meet the demand for mobility. With the emergence of 5G-technology, this trend will most likely continue. However, most internet traffic makes use of standard TCP. TCP does not allow a connection to span several interfaces, even though multiple network interfaces are available. MPTCP is a proposed protocol that enables the use of several interfaces. By distributing data through several paths, MPTCP aims at making internet usage more robust while providing higher throughput and multihoming features. In this thesis, we develop a discrete event simulator to simulate a network. Using this simulator, we analyze and evaluate the performance of MPTCP in various situations. Our findings show that MPTCP has several pitfalls and highlight possible mitigationsMasteroppgave i informatikkINF399MAMN-INFMAMN-PRO

Multipath Routing on Anonymous Communication Systems: Enhancing Privacy and Performance

We live in an era where mass surveillance and online tracking against civilians and organizations have reached alarming levels. This has resulted in more and more users relying on anonymous communications tools for their daily online activities. Nowadays, Tor is the most popular and widely deployed anonymization network, serving millions of daily users in the entire world. Tor promises to hide the identity of users (i.e., IP addresses) and prevents that external agents disclose relationships between the communicating parties. However, the benefit of privacy protection comes at the cost of severe performance loss. This performance loss degrades the user experience to such an extent that many users do not use anonymization networks and forgo the privacy protection offered. On the other hand, the popularity of Tor has captured the attention of attackers wishing to deanonymize their users. As a response, this dissertation presents a set of multipath routing techniques, both at transport and circuit level, to improve the privacy and performance offered to Tor users. To this end, we first present a comprehensive taxonomy to identify the implications of integrating multipath on each design aspect of Tor. Then, we present a novel transport design to address the existing performance unfairness of the Tor traffic.In Tor, traffic from multiple users is multiplexed in a single TCP connection between two relays. While this has positive effects on privacy, it negatively influences performance and is characterized by unfairness as TCP congestion control gives all the multiplexed Tor traffic as little of the available bandwidth as it gives to every single TCP connection that competes for the same resource. To counter this, we propose to use multipath TCP (MPTCP) to allow for better resource utilization, which, in turn, increases throughput of the Tor traffic to a fairer extend. Our evaluation in real-world settings shows that using out-of-the-box MPTCP leads to 15% performance gain. We analyze the privacy implications of MPTCP in Tor settings and discuss potential threats and mitigation strategies. Regarding privacy, in Tor, a malicious entry node can mount website fingerprinting (WFP) attacks to disclose the identities of Tor users by only observing patterns of data flows.In response to this, we propose splitting traffic over multiple entry nodes to limit the observable patterns that an adversary has access to. We demonstrate that our sophisticated splitting strategy reduces the accuracy from more than 98% to less than 16% for all state-of-the-art WFP attacks without adding any artificial delays or dummy traffic. Additionally, we show that this defense, initially designed against WFP, can also be used to mitigate end-to-end correlation attacks. The contributions presented in this thesis are orthogonal to each other and their synergy comprises a boosted system in terms of both privacy and performance. This results in a more attractive anonymization network for new and existing users, which, in turn, increases the security of all users as a result of enlarging the anonymity set

QoE management of multimedia streaming services in future networks : a tutorial and survey

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Cross-layer energy-efficient schemes for multimedia content delivery in heterogeneous wireless networks

The wireless communication technology has been developed focusing on fulfilling the demand in various parts of human life. In many real-life cases, this demand directs to most types of commonly-used rich-media applications which – with diverse traffic patterns - often require high quality levels on the devices of wireless network users. Deliveries of applications with different patterns are accomplished using heterogeneous wireless networks using multiple types of wireless network structure simultaneously. Meanwhile, content deliveries with assuring quality involve increased energy consumption on wireless network devices and highly challenge their limited power resources. As a result, many efforts have been invested aiming at high-quality and energy-efficient rich-media content deliveries in the past years. The research work presented in the thesis focuses on developing energy-aware content delivery schemes in heterogeneous wireless networks. This thesis has four major contributions outlined below: 1. An energy-aware mesh router duty cycle management scheme (AOC-MAC) for high-quality video deliveries over wireless mesh networks. AOC-MAC manages the sleep-periods of mesh devices based on link-state communication condition, reducing their energy consumption by extending their sleep-periods. 2. An energy efficient routing algorithm (E-Mesh) for high-quality video deliveries over wireless mesh networks. E-Mesh evolves an innovative energy-aware OLSR-based routing algorithm by taking energy consumption, router position and network load into consideration. 3. An energy-aware multi-flow-based traffic load balancing scheme (eMTCP) for multi-path content delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks. The scheme makes use of the MPTCP protocol at the upper transport layer of network, allowing data streams to be delivered across multiple consequent paths. Meanwhile, this benefit of MPTCP is also balanced with energy consumption awareness by partially off-loading traffic from the paths with higher energy cost to others. 4. A MPTCP-based traffic-characteristic-aware load balancing mechanism (eMTCP-BT) for heterogeneous wireless networks. In eMTCP-BT, mobile applications are categorized according to burstiness level. eMTCP-BT increases the energy efficiency of the application content deliveries by performing a MDP-based distribution of traffic delivery via the available wireless network interfaces and paths based on the traffic burstiness level

Towards Faster Web Page Loads Over Multiple Network Paths

The rising popularity of mobile devices as the main way people access the web has fuelled a corresponding need for faster web downloads on these devices. Emerging web protocols like HTTP/2 and QUIC employ several features that minimise page load times, but fail to take advantage of the availability of at least two interfaces on today's mobile devices. On the other hand, this spread of devices with access to multiple paths has prompted the design of Multipath TCP, a transport protocol that pools bandwidth across these paths. Although MPTCP was originally evaluated for bandwidth limited bulk transfers, in this work, we determine whether using MPTCP can reduce web page load times, which are often latency bound. To investigate the behaviour of web browsing over MPTCP, we instrumented the Chrome web browser's retrieval of 300 popular web sites in sufficient detail, and computed their dependency graph structure. Furthermore, we implemented PCP, an emulation framework that uses these dependency graphs to ask "what-if" questions about the interactions between a wide range of web site designs, varied network conditions, and different web and transport protocols. Using PCP, we first confirm previous results with respect to the improvements HTTP/2 offers over HTTP/1.1. One obstacle, though, is that many web sites have been sharded to improve performance with HTTP/1.1, spreading their content across multiple subdomains. We therefore examine whether the advice to unshard these domains is beneficial. We find that unsharding is generally advantageous, but is not consistently so. Finally, we examine the behaviour of HTTP/2 over MPTCP. We find that MPTCP can improve web page load times under some regimes; in other cases, using regular TCP on the "best" path is more advantageous. We present enhancements to multipath web browsing that allow it to perform as well as or better than regular TCP on the best path

Cooperative resource pooling in multihomed mobile networks

The ubiquity of multihoming amongst mobile devices presents a unique opportunity for users to co-operate, sharing their available Internet connectivity, forming multihomed mobile networks on demand. This model provides users with vast potential to increase the quality of service they receive. Despite this, such mobile networks are typically underutilized and overly restrictive, as additional Internet connectivity options are predominantly ignored and selected gateways are both immutable and incapable of meeting the demand of the mobile network. This presents a number of research challenges, as users look to maximize their quality of experience, while balancing both the financial cost and power consumption associated with utilizing a diverse set of heterogeneous Internet connectivity options. In this thesis we present a novel architecture for mobile networks, the contribution of which is threefold. Firstly, we ensure the available Internet connectivity is appropriately advertised, building a routing overlay which allows mobile devices to access any available network resource. Secondly, we leverage the benefits of multipath communications, providing the mobile device with increased throughput, additional resilience and seamless mobility. Finally, we provide a multihomed framework, enabling policy driven network resource management and path selection on a per application basis. Policy driven resource management provides a rich and descriptive approach, allowing the context of the network and the device to be taken into account when making routing decisions at the edge of the Internet. The aim of this framework, is to provide an efficient and flexible approach to the allocation of applications to the optimal network resource, no matter where it resides in a mobile network. Furthermore, we investigate the benefits of path selection, facilitating the policy framework to choose the optimal network resource for specific applications. Through our evaluation, we prove that our approach to advertising Internet connectivity in a mobile network is both efficient and capable of increasing the utilization of the available network capacity. We then demonstrate that our policy driven approach to resource management and path selection can further improve the user’s quality of experience, by tailoring network resource usage to meet their specific needs