  Bandwidth requirements of both wireless and wired clients in access networks
continue to increase rapidly, primarily due to the growth of video traffic.
Application awareness can be utilized in access networks to optimize quality of
experience (QoE) of end clients. In this study, we utilize information at the
client-side application (e.g., video resolution) to achieve superior resource
allocation that improves user QoE. We emphasize optimizing QoE of the system
rather than quality of service (QoS), as user satisfaction directly relies on
QoE and optimizing QoS does not necessarily optimize QoE, as shown in this
study. We propose application-aware resource-allocation schemes on an Ethernet
passive optical network (EPON), which supports wireless (utilizing orthogonal
frequency division multiple access) and wired clients running video-conference
applications. Numerical results show that the application-aware
resource-allocation schemes improve QoE for video-conference applications for
wired and wireless clients.
