SDN-enabled Game-Aware Network Management for Residential Gateways

Residential gateways play a key role in providing internet access to home consumers. Nowadays, users in the same home with heterogeneous applications share a common gateway. As such, the gateway becomes the bandwidth bottleneck, leading to impairments and negatively affecting users' Quality of Experience (QoE). In the case of delay sensitive applications like video streaming and online gaming, this impairment becomes more crucial. In this paper, we present an SDN-enabled optimization-based scheme for optimally sharing the bandwidth among network flows within a residential gateway. We target online game flows and try to provide them with a higher QoE while not starving other traffic flows. Our optimization model considers the nature of network flows, and aims to maximize the bandwidth utilization. Our experimental results show improvements in bandwidth efficiency by almost 15% and in fairness by almost 11.5% among active network flows compared to conventional methods. In addition, the proposed method minimizes the overall delay experienced by players by almost half, outperforming the commonly-used max-min fairness and Round Robin schemes.