Timber: An SDN based emulation platform for QoE Management Experimental Research

In this paper, we present an open source Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based emulation platform called Timber. It is aimed at providing the research community with a tool for experimenting new Quality of Experience (QoE) management procedures and tools in multimedia service delivery. Timber is developed on the top of Mininet SDN emulator and Ryu SDN controller, which provides the major functionalities of the traffic engineering abstractions in SDN environment. Moreover, the platform provides an actual complete video streaming application including the implementation of the server side and client side probes for QoE measurements which have functionalities to store the quality measurements into the cloud database accessible to the SDN controller application. In this paper, we first discuss the general architecture and framework of Timber. Secondly, we provide the implementation details and major functionalities of the platform. Thirdly, we provide experimental results to highlight the major functionalities of Timber by 4 different scenarios which include traffic shaping through DiffServ and dynamic resource allocation by queuing strategies.