User-oriented QoE-driven server selection for multimedia service provisioning in content distribution networks

Quality of Experience (QoE) support becomes more demanding due to the increasing popularity of multimedia services. However, QoE-based multimedia provisioning will impose a high pressure on server capacity and network bandwidth, which becomes one of the major concerns for both content providers and network operators. A common approach for efficient and scalable multimedia service provisioning in content distribution networks (CDN) is to replicate certain “hot” service or content from the original server to multiple replica servers, usually closer to end users. However, how to direct distributed user requests to an appropriate replica server to fundamentally improve the user perceived service quality largely remains unknown. In this paper, we present a user-oriented QoE-driven server selection scheme to solve the aforementioned problem. Experiments carried out on a real-world network have been performed to evaluate the proposed scheme, and the results show that the proposed scheme can improve QoE perceived by end users at least 24.6%.