QoE-based server selection for content distribution networks

As current server capacity and network bandwidth become increasingly overloaded by the rapid growth of high quality emerging multimedia services such as mobile online gaming, social networking or IPTV, a critical factor of success of these multimedia services becomes the end-user perception of quality while them using the service. As a result, user-centered approaches that consider quality of experience (QoE) constitute the current design trend for network systems of content providers and network operators. A content distribution network (CDN) that replicates the content from original servers to the replicated servers close to end users is actually an effective solution to improve network quality. We propose a QoE-based server selection algorithm in the context of a CDN architecture. Using realistic characteristics of the server selection process, we formalize our selection model as a sequential decision problem solved by the multi-armed bandit (MAB) paradigm. By using realistic experiments, we demonstrate that our approach yields significant improvements in term of user perception compared to traditional methods (such as Fastest, Closest and Round Robin).