Improving the Expected Quality of Experience in Cloud-Enabled Wireless Access Networks

Wireless data traffic, especially video traffic, has been growing at a rapid pace. Innovative network architectures and protocols are needed to improve the efficiency of data delivery. The trend toward integrating advanced information technologies and communications technologies is creating unprecedented opportunities in the design of infrastructure for network-centric services. The rapid growth in cloud computing and middle box deployment is an outcome of such integration. A similar level of success can be expected if this paradigm is adopted by access networks. This paper presents a computation-capable and programmable wireless access network architecture to enable more efficient and robust content delivery. It incorporates in-network processing, caching, and communications under a unified software defined networking platform. To address the multiple resource management challenges that arise in exploiting such integration, we propose a framework to optimize the expected quality of experience of multiple video streams, subject to wireless transmission capacity and in-network computation power constraints. The evaluation results demonstrate the benefits of in-network processing and resource optimization for video content delivery.