Quality Of Experience Meets Operators Revenue: Dash Aware Management for Mobile Streaming

In this paper, we apply the recent MPEG-DASH SAND standard for streaming-aware networking elements to develop and investigate an integrated mobile network bandwidth management and resource allocation mechanism. It is used to achieve high quality of experience of the mobile streaming users while jointly assuring high revenue operations by the network operator and by the system's video service providers. The Integrated Manager (IM) leverages its DANE functionalities as defined by SAND standard, namely the capability of using feedback from base stations forming a cluster and from streaming clients, to associate to each user both a dynamic Quality of Experience (QoE) related priority and a static Willing-to-Pay factor related to the user service plan. These two metrics are used by the IM to manage resources belonging to the base stations cluster first at a distributed and then at a centralized level. Specifically, the IM is able to statistically share a bandwidth pool among multiple cells of a single operator, and possibly of multiple operators, to allocate at times excess bandwidth for use in certain cells for the purpose of providing enhanced QoE to identified streams. Simulation results show that the users' need for valuable (higher payoff) bandwidth is of statistical and possibly burst nature so that integrated management and statistical sharing of the bandwidth pool by multiple entities becomes highly effective, when compared to a competitive centralized approach.