Towards a Framework for Comparing Application-Network Interaction Mechanisms
Susanna Schwarzmann, Thomas Zinner, Ognjen Dobrijević · 2016
Multimedia services, such as HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) and audio conferencing, hold a dominant share in Internet traffic and are critical to end-user quality of experience (QoE). Since a distributed, application-level adaptation to the available network resources may not result in an optimal and fair QoE among heterogeneous clients, there is the need for a coordinated application-network interaction (App-Net), which includes exchange of monitoring and control information between the involved entities. Numerous App-Net approaches have been proposed, but typically for very specific use cases. A systematic comparison of such solutions, which would identify their pros and cons, as well as potential application scenarios, is missing. Our paper addresses this gap by providing an overview of QoE-centric App-Net mechanisms and deducing an abstract interaction model. In order to evaluate a trade-off between QoE gains and the messaging overhead, we use the latter model to compare two App-Net mechanisms for HAS against a baseline HAS implementation.