A Novel Strategy for Quality of Experience Monitoring and Management

In this paper, we illustrate a Software Defined Network (SDN)-based architecture for Quality of Experience (QoE) management that solves two of the major problems of current networking technologies which are related to the limitations in scalability and flexibility. Its advantage is the exploitation of the virtualization features of the network nodes and devices to flexibly deploy monitoring and control functions in the different points of the network according to the SDN control functions. As a result the QoE monitoring and management is deployed at the application layer on top of the controller. In order to evaluate the proposed framework and architecture, a platform has been developed, which is called QoE-MoMa (QoE-Monitoring and Management) platform, making use of the Opendaylight solution and Mininet emulation environment. To evaluate QoE-MoMa, we focused on the video streaming service, whose final quality has been evaluated using the estimated MOS (eMOS) model that mostly considers rebuffering events, duration of the rebuffering, switch quality rates, video resolution, and quantization parameter. The results show the efficiency of the proposed approach observing that higher QoE level is achieved if we consider application and network parameters. In conclusion, we consider that QoE-MoMa is useful as a QoE monitoring and management tool for a variety of services and can be deployed on a real network conveniently.