QMoEs: A Bandwidth Estimation and Monitoring Tool for QoE-Driven Broadband Networks

The multimedia landscape is evolving towards more customized services which imply increasingly stringent requirements on networks. The triple-Play environment is insufficient to adapt to each requested service and deliver it over the Internet with guaranteed Quality of Experience (QoE). Next Generation Networks (NGNs) are tackling this limitation bringing together well-known QoS mechanisms which may increase the range of personalized media services over fixed access in a cost-effective way. The RUBENS (Rethinking the Usage of Broadband access for Experience-optimized Networks and Services) initiative defines a new network architecture which gathers most relevant QoS mechanisms to improve users´ end-to-end QoS. In the context of these QoS mechanisms, we present the QMoEs utility (Quality Monitoring and Estimation): an Available Bandwidth Estimation Tool (ABETT) integrated within the RUBENS framework to enhance (together with other RUBENS´ mechanisms) the delivered QoS and performed QoE. Our study is practically relevant as it does not limit to the implementation and evaluation of QMoEs performance. Besides the QMoEs evaluation through an extensive simulation study using OPNET, this work also explains how QMoEs is embedded within a particular architecture, aspect which reference ABETT implementation studies do not consider.