An incentive-based mixed QoE framework for content delivery to smart homes

Abstract

Smart-home is becoming increasingly popular in recent years, and it introduces a new content retrieval paradigm - delay-insensitive downloading. In this new paradigm, users do not require the content retrieval task to finish as soon as possible, but only set a deadline for it. We study the role of this paradigm in the traffic engineering of a chunk-based cloud storage service. We propose that it could help to reduce the high intra-datacenter traffic at peak resulting from the chunk-based architecture, by delaying users' content requests when necessary. Because of the introduction of the new paradigm, we consider the co- existence of three applications (downloading, streaming, delay-insensitive downloading) in the service, and try to understand the best way to delay users' requests. We conduct an incentive-based study for the evaluation of schemes of delaying users' requests: the service provider pays incentives to users to promote this new paradigm. The incentive, as well as users' application-specific QoE on the service, is modelled, and a framework for the evaluation is presented. We then apply our framework to study several proposed delay schemes and present both quantitative and qualitative results.