Management of virtual network resources for multimedia applications

The Internet is the primary means for multimedia content sharing, playing a central role in the lifestyle of users. As a consequence, in the past few years, the traffic demand for access and edge networks has increased (video stream downloading, videoconferencing or even the broadcasting of video streams through the Internet), since multimedia applications have strict requirements, including high bandwidth, small amount of loss and low delay. To address this scenario, the edge as a service (EaaS) paradigm arises as a suitable approach to increasing the quality of Internet access. The EaaS uses network virtualization and software-defined networks to improve the resource utilization and manageability. Within this context, this article proposes a framework to manage the virtual network resource (VNR) according to the multimedia application characteristics, and not only the network requirements. Additionally, a study about the relationship between quality of experience (QoE) and VNR availability was performed to be used as a basis for a proposed resource allocation adjustment mechanism. Experiments using real multimedia traffic under distinct scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework to ensure the QoE of users through the management of the VNR.