The increasing consumption of multimedia services and the demand of high-quality services from customers has triggered a fundamental change in how we administer networks in terms of abstraction, separation, and mapping of forwarding, control and management aspects of services. The industry and the academia are embracing 5G as the future network capable to support next generation vertical applications with different service requirements. To realize this vision in 5G network, the physical network has to be sliced into multiple isolated logical networks of varying sizes and structures which are dedicated to different types of services based on their requirements with different characteristics and requirements (e.g., a slice for massive IoT devices, smartphones or autonomous cars, etc.). Softwarization using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV)in 5G networks are expected to fill the void of programmable control and management of network resources. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and updated solutions related to 5G network slicing using SDN and NFV. Firstly, we present 5G service quality and business requirements followed by a description of 5G network softwarization and slicing paradigms including essential concepts, history and different use cases. Secondly, we provide a tutorial of 5G network slicing technology enablers including SDN, NFV, MEC, cloud/Fog computing, network hypervisors, virtual machines & containers. Thidly, we comprehensively survey different industrial initiatives and projects that are pushing forward the adoption of SDN and NFV in accelerating 5G network slicing. A comparison of various 5G architectural approaches in terms of practical implementations, technology adoptions and deployment strategies is presented. Moreover, we provide a discussion on various open source orchestrators and proof of concepts representing industrial contribution. The work also investigates the standardization efforts in 5G networks regarding network slicing and softwarization. Additionally, the article presents the management and orchestration of network slices in a single domain followed by a comprehensive survey of management and orchestration approaches in 5G network slicing across multiple domains while supporting multiple tenants. Furthermore, we highlight the future challenges and research directions regarding network softwarization and slicing using SDN and NFV in 5G networks.

In this paper, we present an open source Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based emulation platform called Timber. We aim to provide the research community with an experimental tool for the design and evaluation of the new Quality of Experience (QoE) management and monitoring procedures for video streaming. To this aim, the main functionalities of Timber include: i) an SDN application for taking QoE-aware management decisions; ii) an SDN controller to monitor the network's QoS (Quality of Service) and implement network management actions, such as network slicing and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) based prioritization operations; iii) a complete video streaming application including a multimedia server and a DASH-based client video player; iv) a user-end probe at the client video player to monitor QoE-related video application parameters, which are stored in a database that can be accessed by the SDN application; v) data analysis tools, which enable easy data visualization of measured QoS and QoE metrics as well as execution of statistical analysis of experimental results. In this article, we introduce and describe the main characteristics and functionalities of Timber as well as the implementation details. Finally, we provide experimental results of a video streaming scenario to demonstrate the capability of Timber to implement and test QoE-aware management approaches.

The Quality of Experience (QoE) management procedures for multimedia services benefit from an effective collaboration between the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and the Over-The-Top (OTT) service providers as the former can allocate the appropriate network resources to the users and the latter has access to key influence factors for having a proper view of the provided QoE. One successful collaboration model is the zero-rated data rate approach, according to which the MNO limits the data rate of the users towards the collaborating OTT applications with the benefit for the user that the generated traffic is not counted in her monthly contract data limit. Accordingly, the MNO may reduce the network congestion, and the users are encouraged to select the collaborating OTT applications. Though, this approach does not consider the resulting QoE, which may vary significantly from one user to another even if the same throughput is given. Based on this consideration, in this paper, we proposed the zero-rated QoE approach, according to which the limit is introduced in terms of QoE rather than throughput. This clearly requires a stronger collaboration between the OTT and the MNO, as the first has to give access to the second to quality influence factors and the latter to allocate resources according to the predicted QoE. The contributions of this paper are: the introduction of the novel zero-rated QoE approach with particular reference to video streaming services; the definition of novel components in the 3GPP architecture so that this approach can be introduced; the definition of the algorithm for the allocation of the appropriate radio resources to each user; a simulation analysis where the proposed approach is compared with respect to the former zero-rated approach, which shows significant improvements in terms of average provided quality and quality fairness at the same overall throughput.

Recent studies implemented collaboration between Over-The-Top (OTT) service and Internet Service Provider (ISP) concerning information exchange between the providers. This information is used to accurately predict the delivered Quality of Experience (QoE) and decide the correcting network management actions. In this scenario, we aim to investigate the impact of the frequency of information exchange between OTT and ISP on end users' QoE and network resource utilization. Firstly, we propose our information-centric QoE-aware collaborative service management approach by defining the type of information to be acquired and exchanged between OTT and ISP. Secondly, we present our platform based on the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, which we used to conduct the experiments. Finally, we conduct experiment results that compare the proposed collaborative approach with the case of no collaboration when the sampling interval of information exchange varies between 2 s and 32 s. The experiment results show that a higher frequency of information exchange may result in better network reliability and delivered QoE, but a frequency higher than 1/4 Hz may not further improve the delivered QoE.

In this paper, we present an open source Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based emulation platform called Timber. It is aimed at providing the research community with a tool for experimenting new Quality of Experience (QoE) management procedures and tools in multimedia service delivery. Timber is developed on the top of Mininet SDN emulator and Ryu SDN controller, which provides the major functionalities of the traffic engineering abstractions in SDN environment. Moreover, the platform provides an actual complete video streaming application including the implementation of the server side and client side probes for QoE measurements which have functionalities to store the quality measurements into the cloud database accessible to the SDN controller application. In this paper, we first discuss the general architecture and framework of Timber. Secondly, we provide the implementation details and major functionalities of the platform. Thirdly, we provide experimental results to highlight the major functionalities of Timber by 4 different scenarios which include traffic shaping through DiffServ and dynamic resource allocation by queuing strategies.

It is a matter of fact that quality of experience (QoE) has become one of the key factors determining whether a new multimedia service will be successfully accepted by the final users. Accordingly, several QoE models have been developed with the aim of capturing the perception of the user by considering as many influencing factors as possible. However, when it comes to adopting these models in the management of the services and networks, it frequently happens that no single provider has access to all of the tools to either measure all influencing factors parameters or control over the delivered quality. In particular, it often happens to the over-the-top (OTT) and Internet service providers (ISPs), which act with complementary roles in the service delivery over the Internet. On the basis of this consideration, in this article we first highlight the importance of a possible OTT-ISP collaboration for a joint service management in terms of technical and economic aspects. Then we propose a general reference architecture for a possible collaboration and information exchange among them. Finally, we define three different approaches, namely joint venture, customer lifetime value based, and QoE fairness based. The first aims to maximize the revenue by providing better QoE to customers paying more. The second aims to maximize the profit by providing better QoE to the most profitable customers (MPCs). The third aims to maximize QoE fairness among all customers. Finally, we conduct simulations to compare the three approaches in terms of QoE provided to the users, profit generated for the providers, and QoE fairness.

This paper focuses on passive Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring at user end devices as a necessary activity of the ISP (Internet Service Provider) for an effective quality-based service delivery. The contribution of the work is threefold. Firstly, we highlight the opportunities and challenges for the QoE monitoring of the Over-The-Top (OTT) applications while investigating the available interfaces for monitoring the deployed applications at the end-device. Secondly, we propose a multilayer passive QoE monitor for OTT applications at the user terminal with ISPs prospect. Five layers are considered: user profile, context, resource, application and network layers. Thirdly, we consider YouTube as a case study for OTT video streaming applications in our experiments for analyzing the impact of the monitoring cycle on the user end device resources, such as the battery, RAM and CPU utilization at end user device.

In this work, we propose a QoE-aware collaboration approach between Over-The-Top providers (OTT) and Internet Service Providers (ISP) based on the maximization of the profit by considering the user churn of Most Profitable Customers (MPCs), which are classified in terms of the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). The contribution of this work is multifold. Firstly, we investigate the different perspectives of ISPs and OTTs regarding QoE management and why they should collaborate. Secondly, we investigate the current ongoing collaboration scenarios in the multimedia industry. Thirdly, we propose the QoE-aware collaboration framework based on the CLV, which includes the interfaces for information sharing between OTTs and ISPs and the use of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and surrogate servers. Finally, we provide simulation results aiming at demonstrating the higher profit is achieved when collaboration is introduced, by engaging more MPCs with respect to current solutions.

The ever-increasing network traffic and user expectations at reduced cost make the delivery of high Quality of Experience (QoE) for multimedia services more vital than ever in the eyes of Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Real-time quality monitoring, with a focus on the user, has become essential as the first step in cost-effective provisioning of high quality services. With the recent changes in the perception of user privacy, the rising level of application-layer encryption and the introduction and deployment of virtualized networks, QoE monitoring solutions need to be adapted to the fast changing Internet landscape. In this contribution, we provide an overview of state-of-the-art quality monitoring models and probing technologies, and highlight the major challenges ISPs have to face when they want to ensure high service quality for their customers.

The objective of this work is the investigation of a possible collaboration between Over-The-Top (OTTs) service providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which is centered around the Quality of Experience (QoE). Initially, we define a reference architecture with the required modules and interfaces for the interaction between the two providers. Then, we focus on the modeling of the revenue, whose maximization drives the collaboration. It is considered as depending on the user churn, which in turn is affected by the QoE and is modeled using the Sigmoid function. We illustrate simulation results based on our proposed collaboration approach which highlights how the proposed strategy increases the revenue generation and QoE for both players hence providing a ground for ISP to join the loop of revenue generation between OTT and users.