ExBox: Experience management middlebox for wireless networks

Enterprise wireless networks face significant challenges to deliver Quality-of-Experience (QoE) with the variety of mobile applications. One of the fundamental challenges is that the traditional definition of network capacity (often defined as throughput capacity) is not sufficient to reflect applications' requirements in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose to rethink the network capacity of wireless networks to better incorporate QoE. Specifically, we first propose a novel concept of an Experiential Capacity Region (ExCR) for wireless networks. ExCR is defined as a set of simultaneous application flows whose QoE requirements can be satisfied by the network. Next, we present the infrastructure based ExBox system that measures perapplication QoE metrics and determines the ExCR for wireless networks to better serve a set of mobile application flows. In its core, ExBox employs light-weight machine learning techniques that are tailored for dynamic wireless environments. Through both large-scale simulations and extensive real-life experiments on WiFi and LTE networks, we show that ExBox delivers QoE in admission control decision with a precision of 0.8 - 0.9, even when clients experience diverse channel quality. Moreover, ExBox quickly adapts to changing network environments without much overhead.