SDN-Based QoE Evaluation Methods for HTTP Adaptive Video Streaming

Nowadays, video streaming has become the main traffic on the Internet. The demand of people for video services is growing higher and higher. In order to meet the requirements of users, the service providers such as network providers and application providers must guarantee good Quality of Experience (QoE). This paper reviews the influencing factors and main evaluation methods of user QoE, and introduces the research status and progress in this field. Then, combining with the most popular HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) and SDN (Software-Defined Networking) technologies, we build an SDN-based QoE experimental platform for video streaming based some open-source software packages, in which we integrate a variety of QoE evaluation models and real extensible network environment modules. Finally, in the SDN-based virtual network, we perform videos multiple times, using different QoE evaluation methods each time, and obtain visual results. Our results prove that the platform architecture has the ability of helping researchers to carry out QoE evaluation testing in a variety of virtual network environments.