Improving quality of multimedia services through network performance isolation in a mobile device

Due to the advancement of hardware and software, today’s mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablet PCs, and laptops, are capable of providing a wide range of services. Among various services, a lot of users use multimedia services on mobile devices, and the size of mobile multimedia traffic is constantly increasing. Especially, the growth of social networking services and content-sharing sites stimulates creating and sharing of multimedia contents. Such environment made it possible for today’s mobile users to frequently download or upload multimedia data. Nowadays, smartphones allow users to multi-task between different services, so the multimedia service often coexists with background services in a mobile device at the same time. In these cases, the performance degradation of a multimedia service happens due to concurrently running background services in the device. In this paper, we propose MuSNet, a scheme for improving QoS and QoE of multimedia services through network performance isolation in a mobile device, which resolves the aforementioned problem by applying the concept of performance isolation to the multimedia services. MuSNet is the mobile device-based scheme without any modification on servers. Furthermore, unlike most performance isolation implemented by virtual machines, we suggest a scheme that does not require virtualization that might be heavy for mobile devices. The proposed scheme was implemented on a smartphone by modifying the kernel, and various experiments were conducted to evaluate the advanced system behavior of MuSNet.