Application-based QoE support with P4 and OpenFlow

Abstract

Although Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WANs) are now widely deployed in several production networks, they are largely restricted to traffic engineering approaches based on layer 4 (L4) of the network protocol stack. Such approaches result in improved Quality-of-Service (QoS) of the network overall without necessarily focussing on the requirements of a specific application. However, the emergence of application protocols such as QUIC and HTTP/2 needs an investigation of layer 5-based (L5) approaches in order to improve users Quality-of-Experience (QoE). In this paper, we leverage the capabilities of flexible, P4-based switches that incorporate protocol-independent packet processing in order to intelligently route traffic based on application headers. We use Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) video streaming as an example to show how such an approach can not only provide flexible traffic management but also improve application QoE. Our evaluation consists of an actual deployment in a research testbed, Chameleon, where we leverage the benefits of fast paths in order to retransmit video segments in higher qualities. Further, we analyze real-world ABR streaming sessions from a large-scale CDN and show that our approach can successfully maximize QoE for all users in the dataset.