Monitoring and Control of QoE in Media Streams using the Click Software Router

Services provided Over-The-Top to Internet users are becoming more advanced and the business models for operating in this domain are becoming more sustainable. When services of this type are something which is paid for, the importance of optimizing Quality of Experience (QoE) is crucial. In this paper we study and test a selected mechanism PostACK for controlling TCP flows, and implement a home gateway testbed using the Click Modular Router for performing live experiments and measurements. The analysis and measurements show that it is highly likely that TCP mechanisms can be used to control the QoE of these services, assuming that there is a known user preference. One of the media streams investigated was an adaptive http streaming solution based on Microsoft Silverlight technology.