Personalizing the home network experience using cloud-based SDN

Home networks are becoming increasingly rich in devices and applications, but continue to share the broadband link in a neutral way. We believe the time is ripe to personalize the home network experience, allowing a household to differentiate its users (e.g. father's laptop prioritized over kid's iPad) and services (e.g. video streaming prioritized over downloading). In this paper we argue that SDN provides a way to automate self-customization by households, while cloud-based delivery simplifies subscriber management. We develop an architecture comprising a cloud-based front-end portal and SDN-based back-end APIs, and show how these can be used by the subscriber to improve streaming-video (YouTube) quality and video conferencing (Skype) experience, and to permit device-specific parental controls (e.g. Facebook access). We prototype and validate our solution in a platform comprising the Floodlight controller and OVS switches. Lastly, we evaluate our solutions via experiments of realistic scenarios to quantify the benefits in terms of improved quality of experience and new features for the user.