Seminar: QWatch: Detecting and Locating QoE anomaly for VoD in the Cloud

Speaker: Prof Hyong Kim, Carnegie Mellon University
UCL Contact: Miguel Rodrigues (Visitors from outside UCL please email in advance).
Date/Time: 08 Dec 16, 14:00 - 15:00
Venue: Barlow Room

Abstract

Commercial large-scale VoD systems such as Netflix and Amazon rely on Clouds and Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to deliver videos to users around the world. Various anomalies occur often and degrade users’ Quality of Experience (QoE). Detecting and locating such anomalies are highly complex due to several different entities involved in the end-to-end video delivery. VoD provider, CDN/Cloud providers, intermediate transit Internet Service Providers (ISPs), access ISPs, and end users work together in the video delivery. VoD providers are ultimately concerned with the Quality of Experience (QoE) of their subscribers. Users’ QoE, rather than complex resource parameters, gives more meaningful performance measure of VoD systems.

We propose QWatch, a scalable monitoring system, which detects and locates anomalies based on the end-user QoE in real-time. We evaluate QWatch in a controlled VoD system and production Cloud (Microsoft Azure Cloud and CDN). QWatch correctly detects and locates QoE anomalies in various scenarios based on extensive experiments. We also share several insights obtained from running VoD system with 200 geographically separated users in production Cloud.

Prof Hyong Kim

Dr. Kim is the Drew D. Perkins Chaired Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Carnegie Mellon University. He received the B.Eng. (Honours) degree in electrical engineering from McGill University, and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto. His primary research areas are advanced switching architectures, fault-tolerant, reliable, and secure network and computer system architectures, and distributed computing and network management systems. His Tera ATM switch architecture developed at CMU has been licensed for commercialization. In 1995, Dr. Kim founded Scalable Networks, a Gigabit-Ethernet switching startup. Scalable Networks was later acquired by FORE Systems in 1996. In 2000, Dr. Kim founded AcceLight Networks, an optical networking startup, and was CEO of AcceLight Networks until 2002. He is an author of over 100 published papers and holds over 10 patents in networking and computing technologies.