Slicing Wi‐Fi links based on QoE video streaming fairness

Summary Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HyperText Transfer Protocol (DASH) video streaming is one of the dominant sources of traffic on the Internet, and this traffic is often delivered to users via Wi‐Fi access points. This makes the quality of experience (QoE) of the service susceptible to degradation when the Wi‐Fi link is underperforming, and it can also inflict QoE unfairness, creating situations where users connected to the same Wi‐Fi network feel different levels of QoE. This article presents a system that improves the QoE fairness of DASH video transmission network slicing in the context of Wi‐Fi networks. The proposed system slices the wireless resources unevenly among flows, taking into account the characteristics of the video and the QoE demands for each user. Experimental results show that fairness improves by 56% when compared to an unmanaged network, while the mean QoE is reduced by only 5%. This article creates QoE‐aware slices on the WiFi links by regulating the contention parameters at the physical layer. The proposal is evaluated using video on demand (VoD) on a testbed. Results indicate an overall improvement of VoD QoE over WiFi.