Experimental QoE evaluation of multicast video delivery over IEEE 802.11aa WLANs

Time: July 24, 2017, h. 10:30 am 
Location: Room Garda, Polo scientifico e tecnologico "Fabio Ferrari", Building Povo 1, via Sommarive 5, Povo (Trento)

Speaker 

Francesco Gringoli, University of Brescia

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11aa amendment standardised the Group Addressed Transmission Service (GATS), which extends 802.11 WLANs with a novel set of MAC mechanisms to support an effective and efficient multicast video service. The key challenge with GATS is the selection of the best scheme and its configuration for a given network scenario, as the standard does not provide any guidelines nor any assessment of the performance of each mechanism. Although some previous studies have addressed this challenge, their evaluation is either via analysis or simulations under non-realistic assumptions, or based on ``objective metrics'' (e.g., average throughput, losses) instead of subjective quality metrics, which are required for a proper video performance assessment. We present here a mid-size real-life testbed and a thoughtful methodology that we developed to perform an extensive Quality of Experience (QoE) evaluation of GATS under a variety of scenarios. We analyse the performance of the novel schemes under ideal conditions, as well as under controlled and non-controlled interference, assessing their ability to provide an adequate QoE and quantifying the resources left for other type of traffic. Ours is the first thorough QoE evaluation of GATS in a real-life scenario, providing key insights on their performance, and can be used to derive configuration guidelines for the schemes.

About the Speaker

Francesco Gringoli has been Assistant Professor of Telecommunications at the Dept. of Information Engineering of the University of Brescia, Italy since 2005. His current research interests include performance evaluation and medium access control in Wireless LANs, statistical classification of network traffic, and high-speed packet inspection. In wireless networking, he gained public attention in 2009 when he developed OpenFWWF which allowed many researchers throughout the world to deploy for the first time large testbed of inexpensive prototypes.
Since then he counts a great number of collaborations with Universities (including University of Oxford, University of Edinburgh, UPF, IMDEA Networks Institute, TU Darmstadt) and the industry (including Alcatel Lucent, ZyXEL, Juniper, Adant Tech) which also funded his research. He has been actively participating to FP7 and H2020 European projects, and he got several distinctions.