FlowBazaar: A Market-Mediated Software Defined Communications Ecosystem at the Wireless Edge

TL;DR

FlowBazaar introduces a market-based framework for reconfigurable wireless access networks, enabling adaptive resource allocation to optimize media streaming quality of experience for multiple clients.

Contribution

It presents a novel market-mediated approach that links applications to reconfigurable infrastructure, improving resource allocation and QoE in wireless networks.

Findings

Effective adaptive resource provisioning for YouTube streaming

High QoE achieved for multiple clients at the wireless edge

Demonstrates practical implementation of market-based control

Abstract

The predominant use of wireless access networks is for media streaming applications, which are only gaining popularity as ever more devices become available for this purpose. However, current access networks treat all packets identically, and lack the agility to determine which clients are most in need of service at a given time. Software reconfigurability of networking devices has seen wide adoption, and this in turn implies that agile control policies can be now instantiated on access networks. The goal of this work is to design, develop and demonstrate FlowBazaar, an market-based approach to create a value chain from the application on one side, to algorithms operating over reconfigurable infrastructure on the other, so that applications are able to obtain necessary resources for optimal performance. Using YouTube video streaming as an example, we illustrate how FlowBazaar is able to adaptively provide such resources and attain a high QoE for all clients at a wireless access point.