Implementing Application-Aware Resource Allocation on a Home Gateway for the Example of YouTube

Today's Internet does not offer any quality level beyond best effort for the majority of applications used by private customers. If multiple customers with heterogeneous applications share a bottleneck link to the Internet, this often leads to quality deterioration for the customers. This particularly holds for home networks with small band Internet access and for home networks with resource limitation like a bad channel quality within a wireless network. For such cases, the best effort allocation of resources between heterogeneous applications leads to an unfair distribution of the application quality among the users. To provide a similar application quality for all users, we propose to implement an application-oriented resource management on a home gateway. Therefore, allocation mechanisms need to be implemented such as the prioritization of network flows. Furthermore, a component monitoring the application quality and dynamically triggering these mechanisms is required. We show the feasibility of this concept by the implementation of an application monitor for YouTube on a standard home gateway. The gateway estimates the YouTube video buffers and prioritizes the video clip before the playback buffer depletes.