Improving Quality of Experience and Protocol Performance Using User Context Information

Abstract

As an effective technique for multiplexed utilization of interconnected networks and their hosts, today's Internet protocol stack does not explicitly take into account dynamic end-users and their context information in its architectural design, which affects Internet performance from both the end-user perspective and the network perspective. On the other hand, the rapid progress in context-aware computing techniques as well as cognitive science greatly facilitates collecting and ascertaining context information of Internet end-users. Proper utilization of the highly abstract and substantive end-user's context information presents major opportunities to further enhance the Internet as a user-centric, context-aware and intelligent communication system. To address these research challenges, a novel functional module, called the User-Context Module, is proposed to explicitly and smoothly integrate an end-user's context information into the five-layer Internet protocol stack. In this thesis dissertation, the research is exploited in three phases: (i) basic architectural design of the User-Context Module; (ii) applications of the User-Context Module; (iii) a resource distribution framework that provides context-driven service differentiation, and also incentivizes context sharing and moderate competition under the User-Context Module.

Firstly, we design the basic architecture of the User-Context Module, which consists of three indispensable subsystems. Two fundamental categories of the advanced context information are defined, and corresponding context models are built for three representative Internet services with the aim of empowering the Internet to capture, understand and utilize end-user's context information.

Secondly, we design and implement two applications of the User-Context Module to demonstrate its operation, implementation and performance. The Internet experimental results show that the two applications can effectively enhance the end-user's quality of experience (QoE) and improve the underlying protocol performance.

Lastly, based on the User-Context Module architecture and the deduced context information, we propose a resource distribution framework that (1) provides service differentiation in allocating limited resources; (2) encourage all Internet clients to provide their actual context information; (3) motivate all Internet clients to adopt a moderate competition policy.