A Pure Network-Based Approach to Achieve Always Best Quality Video Streaming

Abstract

The demand for video streaming has been more and more increasing, causing the streaming technology and the related technologies to be improved to meet the requirement of the best quality of experience (QoE) from various users. A lot of research has been focusing on studying users’ behavior or developing streaming client and/or server application. These works estimate the network state passively and are lack of a global view of the network. As a result, they meet difficulty in bandwidth competition, QoE fairness scenarios. Some works optimize routing mechanism to improve video quality and QoE. This work also proposes a pure network-based approach, however taking into account the characteristics of video streaming application, to support an always best QoE to end-users. The proposed approach leverages the advantage of SDN network to convert the explored characteristic of streaming application into the network configuration. The proposal has been implemented on a real testbed. The obtained results show that the proposed mechanism has maintained the best video quality while maximizing the bandwidth for competitor application, i.e., file download using ftp protocol.