YoMo: A YouTube Application Comfort Monitoring Tool

Today’s Internet does not offer any quality level beyond best effort for the majority of applications used by a private customer. In particular, this applies for wire-line or wireless access networks which currently constitute the bottleneck of the communication infrastructure. Following the principle of economic traffic management we propose a collaboration of user and network control in order to achieve a win-win situation through an improved application-aware resource management. In order to do so, a tool runs at the client that continuously monitors the application comfort and communicates it to the network control. The application comfort quantifies how well an application is running. In our example application, YouTube video streaming, the application comfort is expressed by the buffered video playtime. As long as there is enough playtime buffered, the application comfort is high. YoMo, the YouTube monitoring tool, runs on the client, detects YouTube videos and monitors their application comfort and signals it to the resource management tool. An example how to utilize this information for an improved resource management ensuring a high user satisfaction when playing the YouTube video is demonstrated in an IEEE 802.11 based mesh testbed.