Improving the user quality of experience by incorporating intelligent proxies in the network

Abstract

Despite recent advances in computer hardware and the emergence of broadband access networks, client machines are often still not capable of receiving and processing all data generated in networked multimedia applications. Most current systems try to solve this problem by leveraging high-level knowledge of the application to reduce the amount of information clients need to process. However, network related information is often neglected when making such decisions, which can result in a non-optimal Quality of Experience for users. In this work, we propose to insert generic software proxies in the network that are both application and network aware, and we describe how their compound awareness can be exploited to intelligently manage and adapt data streams in networked applications. We also present results from the integration of our work into an existing Networked Virtual Environment. These results clearly indicate that our proxy system can improve the user QoE considerably.