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The DFG project “SDN-enabled Application-aware Network Control Architectures and their Performance Assessment” (DFG SDN-App) focused in phase 1 (Jan 2017 – Dec 2019) on software defined networking (SDN). Being a fundamental paradigm shift, SDN enables a remote control of networking devices made by different vendors from a logically centralized controller. In principle, this enables a more dynamic and flexible management of network resources compared to the traditional legacy networks. Phase 1 focused on multimedia applications and their users’ Quality of Experience (QoE).
This documents reports the achievements of the first phase (Jan 2017 – Dec 2019), which is jointly carried out by the Technical University of Munich, Technical University of Berlin, and University of Würzburg. The project started at the institutions in Munich and Würzburg in January 2017 and lasted until December 2019.
In Phase 1, the project targeted the development of fundamental control mechanisms for network-aware application control and application-aware network control in Software Defined Networks (SDN) so to enhance the user perceived quality (QoE). The idea is to leverage the QoE from multiple applications as control input parameter for application-and network control mechanisms. These mechanisms are implemented by an Application Control Plane (ACP) and a Network Control Plane (NCP). In order to obtain a global view of the current system state, applications and network parameters are monitored and communicated to the respective control plane interface. Network and application information and their demands are exchanged between the control planes so to derive appropriate control actions. To this end, a methodology is developed to assess the application performance and in particular the QoE. This requires an appropriate QoE modeling of the applications considered in the project as well as metrics like QoE fairness to be utilized within QoE management.
In summary, the application-network interaction can improve the QoE for multi-application scenarios. This is ensured by utilizing information from the application layer, which are mapped by appropriate QoS-QoE models to QoE within a network control plane. On the other hand, network information is monitored and communicated to the application control plane. Network and application information and their demands are exchanged between the control planes so to derive appropriate control actions.
In recent years several community testbeds as well as participatory sensing platforms have successfully established themselves to provide open data to everyone interested. Each of them with a specific goal in mind, ranging from collecting radio coverage data up to environmental and radiation data. Such data can be used by the community in their decision making, whether to subscribe to a specific mobile phone service that provides good coverage in an area or in finding a sunny and warm region for the summer holidays.
However, the existing platforms are usually limiting themselves to directly measurable network QoS. If such a crowdsourced data set provides more in-depth derived measures, this would enable an even better decision making. A community-driven crowdsensing platform that derives spatial application-layer user experience from resource-friendly bandwidth estimates would be such a case, video streaming services come to mind as a prime example. In this paper we present a concept for such a system based on an initial prototype that eases the collection of data necessary to determine mobile-specific QoE at large scale. In addition we reason why the simple quality metric proposed here can hold its own.
Currently, we observe a strong growth of services and applications, which use the Internet for data transport. However, the network requirements of these applications differ significantly. This makes network management difficult, since it complicated to separate network flows into application classes without inspecting application layer data. Network virtualization is a promising solution to this problem. It enables running different virtual network on the same physical substrate. Separating networks based on the service supported within allows controlling each network according to the specific needs of the application. The aim of such a network control is to optimize the user perceived quality as well as the cost efficiency of the data transport. Furthermore, network virtualization abstracts the network functionality from the underlying implementation and facilitates the split of the currently tightly integrated roles of Internet Service Provider and network owner. Additionally, network virtualization guarantees that different virtual networks run on the same physical substrate do not interfere with each other. This thesis discusses different aspects of the network virtualization topic. It is focused on how to manage and control a virtual network to guarantee the best Quality of Experience for the user. Therefore, a top-down approach is chosen. Starting with use cases of virtual networks, a possible architecture is derived and current implementation options based on hardware virtualization are explored. In the following, this thesis focuses on assessing the Quality of Experience perceived by the user and how it can be optimized on application layer. Furthermore, options for measuring and monitoring significant network parameters of virtual networks are considered.
Internet applications are becoming more and more flexible to support diverge user demands and network conditions. This is reflected by technical concepts, which provide new adaptation mechanisms to allow fine grained adjustment of the application quality and the corresponding bandwidth requirements. For the case of video streaming, the scalable video codec H.264/SVC allows the flexible adaptation of frame rate, video resolution and image quality with respect to the available network resources. In order to guarantee a good user-perceived quality (Quality of Experience, QoE) it is necessary to adjust and optimize the video quality accurately. But not only have the applications of the current Internet changed. Within network and transport, new technologies evolved during the last years providing a more flexible and efficient usage of data transport and network resources. One of the most promising technologies is Network Virtualization (NV) which is seen as an enabler to overcome the ossification of the Internet stack. It provides means to simultaneously operate multiple logical networks which allow for example application-specific addressing, naming and routing, or their individual resource management. New transport mechanisms like multipath transmission on the network and transport layer aim at an efficient usage of available transport resources. However, the simultaneous transmission of data via heterogeneous transport paths and communication technologies inevitably introduces packet reordering. Additional mechanisms and buffers are required to restore the correct packet order and thus to prevent a disturbance of the data transport. A proper buffer dimensioning as well as the classification of the impact of varying path characteristics like bandwidth and delay require appropriate evaluation methods. Additionally, for a path selection mechanism real time evaluation mechanisms are needed. A better application-network interaction and the corresponding exchange of information enable an efficient adaptation of the application to the network conditions and vice versa. This PhD thesis analyzes a video streaming architecture utilizing multipath transmission and scalable video coding and develops the following optimization possibilities and results: Analysis and dimensioning methods for multipath transmission, quantification of the adaptation possibilities to the current network conditions with respect to the QoE for H.264/SVC, and evaluation and optimization of a future video streaming architecture, which allows a better interaction of application and network.