EmNet: Satisfying the individual user through empathic home networks

We consider optimizing the control of the wide-area link of home routers based on the needs of individual users instead of assuming a canonical user. A careful user study clearly demonstrates that measured end-user satisfaction with a given set of home network conditions is highly variable - user perception and opinion of acceptable network performance is very different from user to user. To exploit this fact we design, implement, and evaluate a prototype system, EmNet, that incorporates direct user feedback from a simple user interface layered over existing web content. This feedback is used to dynamically configure a weighted fair queuing (WFQ) scheduler on the wide-area link. We evaluate EmNet in terms of the measured satisfaction of end-users, and in terms of the bandwidth required. We compare EmNet with an uncontrolled link (the common case today), as well as with statically configured WFQ scheduling. On average, EmNet is able to increase overall user satisfaction by 20% over the uncontrolled network and by 12% over static WFQ. EmNet does so by only increasing the average application bandwidth by 6% over the static WFQ scheduler.