Improved video throughput and reduced gaming delay in WLAN through seamless SDN-based traffic steering

For better quality of experience,WiFi users typically expect stringent application performance requirements such as consistent video streaming, and fast online gaming. With the wireless access substrate typically being the bottleneck in these networks, a few WiFi users ineffectively utilizing the WiFi shared resource can cause allWiFi users (under the sameWiFi coverage) to experience fluctuating network performance. To combat such situations, we need approaches to steer and appropriately control the applications' traffic in order to effectively use the sharedWiFi medium. However, in a network that deals with crowd or private end-users (such as gaming multiplayers or the Internet content distributors), a major challenge involves in controlling the traffic without involvement or modification at the end-host application devices. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based seamless traffic steering and control framework towards providing effective application-specific delivery services such as reduced delay (for gaming traffic), and improved throughput (for video consumption). Unlike simulation-based solutions, we have implemented our framework on a real network testbed environment. With extensive performance study, we demonstrate the prowess of our proposed framework.