QoE-Driven Multimedia Streaming Leveraging Distributed Network Function Virtualization at Edge

Driven by the limitation of legacy network communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in network architecture, from the conventional TCP/IP towards Software Defined Networking (SDN). The main feature of SDN is to give more flexibility to the network by pushing control from forwarding devices into scalable centralized orchestration. This paradigm enables using forwarding storage and processing capacity for caching content at the network level. The objective of this study is to address the Quality of Experience (QoE) problems in video applications. To this end, we propose a network-assisted QoE-aware bitrate adaptation algorithm that works in cooperation with MPEG-DASH's proposed SAND technology and virtualized in-network caching function (denotes vDANE). In the proposed framework, client quality adaptation can be assisted by vDANE according to network bandwidth and availability of the appropriate segment/bitrate stored in vDANEs hosted by OpenFlow switches. Simulation results indicate that the proposed method can improve QoE parameters compared with other solutions.