User control of quality of experience in home networks using SDN

Abstract

Home networks are becoming increasingly complex, with many household devices (PCs tablets, phones, media gateways, smart TVs) and diverse user applications (browsing, video streaming, peer-to-peer, VoIP, gaming) sharing the single broadband access link. In today's architecture the traffic streams compete for bandwidth on a best-effort basis, resulting in poor quality of experience for users. In this paper, we leverage the emerging paradigm of software defined networking (SDN) to enable the ISP to expose some controls to the users to manage service quality for specific devices and applications in their household. Our contributions are to develop an architecture and interface for delegation of such control to the user, and to demonstrate its value via experiments in a laboratory test-bed using three representative applications: video, web-browsing, and large downloads.