Barriers in Seamless QoS for Mobile Applications

TL;DR

This paper investigates the challenges of implementing seamless QoS in mobile networks, highlighting stakeholder participation issues, application misuses, and privacy concerns affecting QoS enforcement.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of WiFi and cellular networks, revealing practical barriers to QoS deployment in mobile environments.

Findings

Mobile VoIP applications request QoS from networks.

OS APIs for QoS are underused or misused by developers.

Wireless networks rewrite or nullify QoS requirements.

Abstract

For seamless QoS, it is important that all the stakeholders, such as the hosts, applications, access networks, routers, and other middleboxes, follow a single protocol and they trust each other. In this article, we investigate the participation of these entities in providing QoS over wireless networks in light of DiffServ QoS architecture. We initiate the study by investigating WiFi and Cellular network traces, which further motivates us a thorough investigation of these stakeholders with empirical measurements. Our findings are the followings. (i) Modern mobile VoIP applications request QoS to the network. (ii) While the operating systems support basic APIs requesting QoS, application developers either are not aware of such requirements or they misuse the architecture for improved QoS. (iii) Wireless access networks rewrite the QoS requirements at the edge and enforce the rest of the routers or hops to provide best effort service. (iv) QoS requests are also nullified by the secure tunnels. (v) Although the access networks may nullify the QoS requests, the performance of the network still may differentiate traffic. We further emphasize that although the latest 5G network considers DiffServ QoS framework, it cannot deal with the challenges posed by the privacy related applications. Network neutrality is going to pose similar challenges.