QoE-Aware Container Scheduler for Co-located Cloud Environments

Cloud management has traditionally considered Service Level Objectives (SLO) based on QoS metrics. However, QoS-focused metrics have a limited effect on the Quality of Experience (QoE) experienced by the clients. This paper proposes a Kubernetes scheduler extension and resource rescheduling that incorporates QoE metrics into SLOs. As a proof of concept, this work evaluates the architecture using the QoE metric proposed in the ITU P.1203 standard, in the context of video streaming services co-located with other services. Experimental results show that our scheduler improves the average QoE by 50% compared to other schedulers, while resource rescheduling improved the average QoE by 135%. In addition, our architecture eliminated over-provisioning altogether.