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<p>Providing a satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) to Internet users is crucial
for content and service providers. When users get bad QoE from an application, such
as the videos they are watching on a streaming provider keep freezing or the shopping
Web site they are visiting takes a long time to load,</p><p>they often spend less
time on the application, return to it less frequently, </p><p>or even worse they might
switch to an alternative application, in all cases hurting the business financially.
</p><p>While some applications such as Internet telephony have stringent latency requirements
and others such as video-on-demand are more delay tolerant and depend more on bandwidth,
there are also many applications such as live streaming and Web browsing which require
both low latency and sufficient bandwidth for good QoE. Towards the goal of improving
application QoE in general, this thesis examines the potential of making better use
of the existing Internet infrastructure in two separate directions. In one direction,
we focus on reducing latency on the Internet by targeting the infrastructural inefficiencies
in the lower layers of the network stack, and in the other we focus on efficient allocation
of bandwidth to applications based on user preferences. With these goals in mind,
this thesis attempts to answer the following questions specifically: (a) How slow
is the Internet today and what are the causes of latency? </p><p>(b) Can we make better
use of existing fiber-optic infrastructure to reduce latencies in the wide-area? and
(c) Can we provide the users with simple mechanisms to express their application preferences
and enforce those preferences in the network?</p>
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