Optimizing User Experience through Implicit Content-aware Network Service in the Home Environment

There has always been a gap between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and end users when considering the performance of network-based application. On one hand, ISPs keep raising the investment on infrastructures to speed up the data transportation. On the other hand, users are not satisfied with the perceived quality of experience (QoE). This happens mainly due to the inflexible network flow management, where only the function of rate limiting is provided for home users in the shared network environment. In this paper, we focus on the optimization of users experience by customizing bandwidth allocation for user specified preferences while maintaining high bandwidth utilization. We introduce implicit content-aware bandwidth allocation to minimize the involvement of users on complicated network setting. By leveraging the technique of software-defined networking (SDN), a prototype of content-aware traffic scheduling, Conan, is developed to verify the effectiveness of our design. Experiments show that Conan can reduce the average task completion time of interactive applications by 30-40%. During heavy traffic load, Conan can ensure stable bandwidth for each video streaming flow and greatly reduce the average stall duration.

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