Usage-Dependent Quality of Service for Free WiFi Networks

Free WiFi services offer Internet access at many public places like airports or in public transport vehicles. However, the experienced Quality of Service is often poor and unequal between users. While some users can run bandwidth-intensive applications such as video streaming in these networks, others cannot even perform simple web browsing. The reason for this are extensive delays, caused by network congestion of bandwidth-intensive applications, which especially impair interactive applications such as web browsing.In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve fairness and user experience when sharing common network resources. To this end, we present a Usage-Dependent Quality of Service model (UD-QoS) that dynamically prioritizes network traffic based on the usage intensity of each participant. It shields participants with low usage intensity from congestion delays caused by participants who use the service extensively. We describe the versatile configuration possibilities of UD-QoS and present a Linux-based proof-of-concept implementation.Our evaluations with a physical testbed and popular real-world applications such as video streaming, social media and web browsing show a significant reduction of response times by up to 79% with UD-QoS while keeping processing overhead low. The benefits are particularly large for participants with low usage intensity.