Publications

This textbook provides an introduction to common methods of performance modeling and analysis of communication systems. These methods form the basis of traffic engineering, teletraffic theory, and analytical system dimensioning. The fundamentals of probability theory, stochastic processes, Markov processes, and embedded Markov chains are presented. Basic queueing models are described with applications in communication networks. Advanced methods are presented that have been frequently used in recent practice, especially discrete-time analysis algorithms, or which go beyond classical performance measures such as Quality of Experience or energy efficiency. Recent examples of modern communication networks include Software Defined Networking and the Internet of Things. Throughout the book, illustrative examples are used to provide practical experience in performance modeling and analysis. Download: https://modeling.systems/

Video streaming has become an indispensable technology in people’s lives, while its usage keeps constantly increasing. The variability, instability and unpredictability of network conditions pose one of the biggest challenges to video streaming. In this chapter, we analyze HTTP Adaptive Streaming, a technology that relieves these issues by adapting the video reproduction to the current network conditions. Particularly, we study how context awareness can be combined with the adaptive streaming logic to design a proactive client-based video streaming strategy. Our results show that such a context-aware strategy manages to successfully mitigate stallings in light of network connectivity problems, such as an outage. Moreover, we analyze the performance of this strategy by comparing it to the optimal case, as well as by considering situations where the awareness of the context lacks reliability.

Online video games and cloud gaming are rapidly growing in pervasiveness. Their resource demands can put significant stress on the global communication infrastructure. And network conditions are amongst the chief factors that influence one's enjoyment while playing games. This makes it imperative for video games to be considered for network dimensioning, server placement or protocol development. For that reason, in this work we provide an introduction to the technical aspects of video games in general and of their network aspects in particular. This understanding forms the basis for a rich taxonomy of factors that influence and provide context to a video game's Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE). The taxonomy covers influence factors from all aspects involved in a video game, from the subjective player and game influence factors to the system and networking influence factors. Finally, this work gives an overview of conducted and ongoing research as well as future research opportunities while taking into account lessons learned from past approaches.

The strict restrictions introduced by the COVID-19 lockdowns, which started from March 2020, changed people’s daily lives and habits on many different levels. In this work, we investigate the impact of the lockdown on the communication behavior in the mobile instant messaging application WhatsApp. Our evaluations are based on a large dataset of 2577 private chat histories with 25,378,093 messages from 51,973 users. The analysis of the one-to-one and group conversations confirms that the lockdown severely altered the communication in WhatsApp chats compared to pre-pandemic time ranges. In particular, we observe short-term effects, which caused an increased message frequency in the first lockdown months and a shifted communication activity during the day in March and April 2020. Moreover, we also see long-term effects of the ongoing pandemic situation until February 2021, which indicate a change of communication behavior towards more regular messaging, as well as a persisting change in activity during the day. The results of our work show that even anonymized chat histories can tell us a lot about people’s behavior and especially behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic and thus are of great relevance for behavioral researchers. Furthermore, looking at the pandemic from an Internet provider perspective, these insights can be used during the next pandemic, or if the current COVID-19 situation worsens, to adapt communication networks to the changed usage behavior early on and thus avoid network congestion.

The Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is one of the fastest growing Internet of Things (IoT) access protocols. It operates in the license free 868 MHz band and gives everyone the possibility to create their own small sensor networks. The drawback of this technology is often unscheduled or random channel access, which leads to message collisions and potential data loss. For that reason, recent literature studies alternative approaches for LoRaWAN channel access. In this work, state-of-the-art random channel access is compared with alternative approaches from the litera- ture by means of collision probability. Furthermore, a time scheduled channel access methodology is presented to completely avoid collisions in LoRaWAN. For this approach, an exhaustive simulation study was conducted and the performance was evaluated with random access cross-traffic. In a general theoretical analysis the limits of the time scheduled approach are discussed to comply with duty cycle regulations in LoRaWAN.

Streaming has become the dominant source of media consumption, which not only applies to the widely researched field of video streaming, but also to music streaming. Here, previous studies so far have only researched the impact of streaming aspects, such as stalling events or initial loading times, on the QoE of music streaming. However, when using a music streaming application, users are already facing waiting times along the click path before they can start the actual streaming. These waiting times are caused by browsing delays, e.g., during searching for songs or scrolling through playlists, and can potentially deteriorate the QoE of the music streaming application. In this work, we conduct an online QoE study to quantify the impact of these browsing delays with the support of an emulated mobile music streaming web app. We found that browsing delays have no impact on the music streaming QoE, which shows that users are able to clearly distinguish between the two main functionalities of such apps, namely, browsing and streaming. However, browsing delays significantly reduce the QoE of the entire music streaming application, to a similar extent as if QoE degradations happen during the actual streaming. This shows that both browsing and streaming are equally important and have to be considered when designing music streaming applications.

Providing sophisticated Web Quality of Experience (QoE) has become paramount for web service providers and network operators alike. Due to advances in Web technologies (HTML5, responsive design, etc.), traditional Web QoE models focusing mainly on loading times have to be refined and improved. In this work, we relate Google's Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics for improving user experience, to the loading time aspects of Web QoE. To this end, we first perform objective measurements in the Web using Google's Lighthouse. To close the gap between metrics and experience, we complement these objective measurements with subjective assessment by performing multiple crowdsourcing QoE studies. In these studies, we use CWeQS, a customized framework to emulate the entire web page loading process, and ask users for their experience while controlling the Core Web Vitals. Our results suggest that the Core Web Vitals have less predictive value for Web QoE than expected and that page loading times remain the main influence factor in this context.

The wide adoption of end-to-end encryption is drastically limiting the visibility Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have on the performance of the services consumed by their customers. In times of strong competition, where customer experience plays a key role in churn management, ISPs require novel solutions enabling network-wide Quality of Experience (QoE) monitoring. To this end, we present DeepQoE, a deep-learning based approach to infer the QoE of web services and mobile applications from the ISP perspective, relying exclusively on the analysis of encrypted network traffic. Using raw features derived from the encrypted stream of bytes as input to deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), DeepQoE infers the Speed Index of web browsing sessions and general mobile apps with unprecedented accuracy, improving the state of the art by more than 25%, and reducing the QoE inference error in terms of mean opinion scores by nearly 40%. DeepQoE implements a web fingerprinting solution to identify individual web browsing sessions within concurrent web pages traffic, enabling highly detailed, per web page QoE inference in practical deployments. Extensive evaluations over a large and heterogeneous dataset composed of web and app measurements, using different device types and for top-popular websites and apps, confirm the out-performance of DeepQoE over previously used shallow-learning models, as well as the deep-model generalization to different devices, web pages, apps, and network setups. DeepQoE is the first deployable system providing such a deep, highly-detailed QoE for individual web browsing and mobile apps over encrypted traffic, using deep learning models on heterogeneous measurements.

The goal of the white paper at hand is as follows. The definitions of the terms build a framework for discussions around the hype topic ‘crowdsourcing’. This serves as a basis for differentiation and a consistent view from different perspectives on crowdsourced network measurements, with the goal to provide a commonly accepted definition in the community. The focus is on the context of mobile and fixed network operators, but also on measurements of different layers (network, application, user layer). In addition, the white paper shows the value of crowdsourcing for selected use cases, e.g., to improve QoE or regulatory issues. Finally, the major challenges and issues for researchers and practitioners are highlighted. This white paper is the outcome of the Würzburg seminar on “Crowdsourced Network and QoE Measurements” which took place from 25-26 September 2019 in Würzburg, Germany. International experts were invited from industry and academia. They are well known in their communities, having different backgrounds in crowdsourcing, mobile networks, network measurements, network performance, Quality of Service (QoS), and Quality of Experience (QoE). The discussions in the seminar focused on how crowdsourcing will support vendors, operators, and regulators to determine the Quality of Experience in new 5G networks that enable various new applications and network architectures. As a result of the discussions, the need for a white paper manifested, with the goal of providing a scientific discussion of the terms “crowdsourced network measurements” and “crowdsourced QoE measurements”, describing relevant use cases for such crowdsourced data, and its underlying challenges. During the seminar, those main topics were identified, intensively discussed in break-out groups, and brought back into the plenum several times. The outcome of the seminar is this white paper at hand which is – to our knowledge – the first one covering the topic of crowdsourced network and QoE measurements.

In this doctoral thesis we cover the performance evaluation of next generation data plane architectures, comprised of complex software as well as programmable hardware components that allow fine granular configuration. In the scope of the thesis we propose mechanisms to monitor the performance of singular components and model key performance indicators of software based packet processing solutions. We present novel approaches towards network abstraction that allow the integration of heterogeneous data plane technologies into a singular network while maintaining total transparency between control and data plane. Finally, we investigate a full, complex system consisting of multiple software-based solutions and perform a detailed performance analysis. We employ simulative approaches to investigate overload control mechanisms that allow efficient operation under adversary conditions. The contributions of this work build the foundation for future research in the areas of network softwarization and network function virtualization.