Timber: An SDN-Based Emulation Platform for Experimental Research on Video Streaming

In this paper, we present an open source Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based emulation platform called Timber. We aim to provide the research community with an experimental tool for the design and evaluation of the new Quality of Experience (QoE) management and monitoring procedures for video streaming. To this aim, the main functionalities of Timber include: i) an SDN application for taking QoE-aware management decisions; ii) an SDN controller to monitor the network’s QoS (Quality of Service) and implement network management actions, such as network slicing and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) based prioritization operations; iii) a complete video streaming application including a multimedia server and a DASH-based client video player; iv) a user-end probe at the client video player to monitor QoE-related video application parameters, which are stored in a database that can be accessed by the SDN application; v) data analysis tools, which enable easy data visualization of measured QoS and QoE metrics as well as execution of statistical analysis of experimental results. In this article, we introduce and describe the main characteristics and functionalities of Timber as well as the implementation details. Finally, we provide experimental results of a video streaming scenario to demonstrate the capability of Timber to implement and test QoE-aware management approaches.