Aquarema in action: Improving the YouTube QoE in wireless mesh networks

Internet access networks in general and wireless mesh access networks in particular, are the bottleneck of today´s communication networks and consequently most strongly responsible for determining the user satisfaction. The limited bandwidth and the fact that access network are most often used as mere bit pipes are however unfavorable for the users´ quality of experience (QoE). The lack of application-specific service guarantees is especially inadequate in the face of an increasing degree of heterogeneity of Internet applications and their individual service requirements. Application and quality of experience resource management, Aquarema for short, addresses this challenge by enabling application specific network resource management and thereby improves the user QoE. This is achieved by the interaction of application comfort (AC) monitoring tools, running at the clients, and a network advisor which may trigger different resource management tools. AC quantifies how well an application is running and in particular, enables a prediction of the user experience, thereby allowing the network advisor to act upon an imminent QoE degradation. We demonstrate the appeal of Aquarema at the example of YouTube video streaming in a congested IEEE 802.11 based mesh testbed where AC-aware traffic shaping guarantees the successful video playback.