QoE-based bandwidth allocation with SDN in FTTH networks

In the High Speed Internet (HSI) service of the Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) networks, there are increasingly various applications, such as browsing, video streaming, large downloads and online games. They are competing for the fixed bandwidth on a best-effort basis, and finally resulting in the network congestion and poor quality of experience (QoE). Users want to improve the quality of certain applications. However, today´s network service controller (e.g. Broadband Remote Access Server, BRAS) lacks mechanisms to meet the users´ desire to enhance the QoE of specific applications. Moreover, BRAS still lacks mechanisms to allocate the bandwidth resources properly for users´ different applications according to their “sweet points”. “Sweet points” is a specific bandwidth value. The QoE gets worse quickly when the bandwidth is smaller than the “sweet point”, and keeps the same approximately when the bandwidth is larger than the “sweet point”. In this paper, we proposed a novel BRAS architecture using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology, which can improve the user´s QoE by adjusting the bandwidth of a specific application to its “sweet point” according to their requirements. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed novel BRAS, we built a prototype using SDN to help the user to adjust the bandwidth for the specific application and improve the users´ QoE. The experimental results show that users could enhance the QoE of specific applications according to users´ preference.