Tuesday, October 28, 2014

EONA: Experience-Oriented Network Architecture

Presenter: Junchen Jiang



Authors: Junchen Jiang, Vyas Sekar (CMU), Xi Liu (Conviva Inc.), Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley/Databricks Inc./Conviva Inc.), Hui Zhang (CMU/Conviva Inc.)

The speaker argues that Quality of Experience (QoE) matters to content providers (app-providers) and this is reflected by the painstaking efforts taken by many app-providers  to optimize the QoE.  Similarly, infrastructure providers work to optimize the raw performance of their networks.  Unfortunately, while both the app-provider and the infrastructure provider are working to prove performance, these efforts often results in sub-optimal QoE.  


This sub-optimal is a result of two interesting properties.
First, Unfortunately, improving raw performance metrics does not necessarily improve QoE.  Second, disjoint efforts by the app-provider the infrastucte-provider to improve QoE often results in sub-optimal results.   More concretely, this sub-optimality results because neither the App-provider or the infrastucture-provider has both the right information and control knobs to independently improve QoE.

Fortunately, app-providers and content providers have started to form partnerships to exchange information. However, this partnerships and exchanging of information are both done in an-adhoc manner. EONA aims to provide a principled and structured way for the App-providers and the infrastructure-providers to exchange information.EONA provides two interfaces. The first, A2I for the app-provider to alert the infrastructure-provider of bad QoE along certain paths. This information allows the Infrastructure-provider can then use this information to provide better paths to the application.  The second, I2A for the infrastructure-provider to alert the app-provider of routing changes, path information, and low-level statistics. This information provides the app-provider with visibility into the infrastructure and prevents contradictory actions.  In tackling EONA, there are several open issues and research challenges that the authors plan to address. The first, developing an appropriate business model, and the second developing incentives that are aware of privacy and security.

Q&A

Andrew Furgerson: Is government mandate the only way to roll this out?
Junchen Jiang: No, there is no need for government mandate, industries can be incentivized to roll these out using monetary incentives.


David Orjan: Is the model pair-wise? Does it general to being mesh?
Junchen Jiang: Yes, it is pair-wise but you can reduce the communication over head by introducing a central content broker that aggregates and exchanges information.


Jeff Mogul: Have you talked to any ISPs about this?
Junchen Jiang: No. However, these collobarotions are happening but in an ad-hoc way which is why we need a framework to analyze it. 

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