Impact of Internet Routing Policies on Video-QoE: Case Studies and Improvements

Streaming content will account for 91% of all global consumer Internet traffic by 2013. There is an increasing demand for video streams with high perceptual quality. The capability of present day Internet links in delivering high perceptual quality streaming services, however, is not completely understood. Link level degradations caused by intra-domain routing policies and inter-ISP peering policies are hard to obtain, as ISPs often consider such information proprietary. Understanding link level degradations will enable us in designing future protocols, policies, and architectures to meet the rising multimedia demands. This paper presents a trace driven study to understand QoE capabilities of present day Internet links using 51 diverse ISPs with a major presence in US, Europe and Asia-Pacific. We study their links from 38 vantage points in the Internet using both passive tracing and active probing for six days. We provide the first measurements of link level degradations of intra-ISP and inter-ISP peering links from a multimedia standpoint. Our results indicate that Internet routing policies are not optimized for delivering high perceptual quality streaming services. Our study offers surprising insights into intra domain traffic engineering, peering link loading, BGP and the inefficiencies of using ASpath lengths as a routing metric. We also provide comprehensive case studies for every scenario we investigate. Streaming services apart, our Internet measurement results can be used as an input to a variety of research problems.