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

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

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Quality of Experience monitoring and management strategies for future smart networks

One of the major driving forces of the service and network's provider market is the user's perceived service quality and expectations, which are referred to as user's Quality of Experience (QoE). It is evident that QoE is particularly critical for network providers, who are challenged with the multimedia engineering problems (e.g. processing, compression) typical of traditional networks. They need to have the right QoE monitoring and management mechanisms to have a significant impact on their budget (e.g. by reducing the users‘ churn). Moreover, due to the rapid growth of mobile networks and multimedia services, it is crucial for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to accurately monitor and manage the QoE for the delivered services and at the same time keep the computational resources and the power consumption at low levels. The objective of this thesis is to investigate the issue of QoE monitoring and management for future networks. This research, developed during the PhD programme, aims to describe the State-of-the-Art and the concept of Virtual Probes (vProbes). Then, I proposed a QoE monitoring and management solution, two Agent-based solutions for QoE monitoring in LTE-Advanced networks, a QoE monitoring solution for multimedia services in 5G networks and an SDN-based approach for QoE management of multimedia services

Service Provisioning in Edge-Cloud Continuum Emerging Applications for Mobile Devices

Disruptive applications for mobile devices can be enhanced by Edge computing facilities. In this context, Edge Computing (EC) is a proposed architecture to meet the mobility requirements imposed by these applications in a wide range of domains, such as the Internet of Things, Immersive Media, and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. EC architecture aims to introduce computing capabilities in the path between the user and the Cloud to execute tasks closer to where they are consumed, thus mitigating issues related to latency, context awareness, and mobility support. In this survey, we describe which are the leading technologies to support the deployment of EC infrastructure. Thereafter, we discuss the applications that can take advantage of EC and how they were proposed in the literature. Finally, after examining enabling technologies and related applications, we identify some open challenges to fully achieve the potential of EC, and also research opportunities on upcoming paradigms for service provisioning. This survey is a guide to comprehend the recent advances on the provisioning of mobile applications, as well as foresee the expected next stages of evolution for these applications

Towards 5G Software-Defined Ecosystems: Technical Challenges, Business Sustainability and Policy Issues

Techno-economic drivers are creating the conditions for a radical change of paradigm in the design and operation of future telecommunications infrastructures. In fact, SDN, NFV, Cloud and Edge-Fog Computing are converging together into a single systemic transformation termed “Softwarization” that will find concrete exploitations in 5G systems. The IEEE SDN Initiative1 has elaborated a vision, an evolutionary path and some techno-economic scenarios of this transformation: specifically, the major technical challenges, business sustainability and policy issues have been investigated. This white paper presents: 1) an overview on the main techno-economic drivers steering the “Softwarization” of telecommunications; 2) an introduction to the Open Mobile Edge Cloud vision (covered in a companion white paper); 3) the main technical challenges in terms of operations, security and policy; 4) an analysis of the potential role of open source software; 5) some use case proposals for proof-of-concepts; and 6) a short description of the main socio-economic impacts being produced by “Softwarization”. Along these directions, IEEE SDN is also developing of an open catalogue of software platforms, toolkits, and functionalities aiming at a step-by-step development and aggregation of test-beds/field-trials on SDNNFV- 5G

Network-aware video streaming for future media Internet

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