Improving end-to-end QoE via close cooperation between applications and ISPs

In recent years there has been a trend for more user participation in Internet-based services leading to an explosion of user-generated, tailored, and reviewed content and social-networking- based applications. The next generation of applications will continue this trend and be more interactive and distributed, putting the prosumers at the center of a massively multiparticipant communications environment. Furthermore, future networked media environments will be high-quality, multisensory, multi-viewpoint and multistreamed, relying on HD and 3D video. These applications will place unprecedented demands on networks between unpredictable and arbitrarily large meshes of network endpoints. We advocate the development of intelligent cross-layer techniques that, on one hand, will mobilize network and user resources to provide network capacity where it is needed, and, on the other hand, will ensure that the applications adapt themselves and the content they are conveying to available network resources. This article presents an architecture to enable this level of cooperation between the application providers, the users, and the communications networks so that the quality of experience of the users of the application is improved and network traffic optimized.