Fault Tolerance of Real-time Video Streaming Protocols over SDN Networks

Abstract

Video traffic accounts for more than 70% of Internet traffic and is likely to reach 90% in 2020. Real-time video streaming is used in many applications such as sports, video conferencing, video surveillance, and public safety. Video streaming protocols such as MPEG-DASH, HDS and RTMP provide adaptive streaming capability, and application-level fault tolerance to handle failures while providing uninterrupted live video streaming service. Network outages and congestion is common in many situations during emergencies, or large public events. These failures impact live video streaming performance in terms of packet loss, latency, jitter, and video quality. Both transport layer and video streaming protocols have in-built fault tolerance mechanisms. Integrating streaming protocol’s fault handling mechanism with the automatic network fault recovery would provide optimized video streaming performance. The goal of this paper is to investigate how different video streaming protocols perform when fault tolerance is provided by the SDN network. We created a self-healing SDN based MESH network testbed that transports video from a live source to the server. Our experimental results show that RTMP outperforms both MPEG- DASH, and HDS in terms of live video stream recovery and resiliency to link, port, switch, and or controller failures. These results were obtained under controlled network conditions with acceptable latency and jitter. However, switching time for recovery is significantly higher than traditional network setup, but with SDN better programable and automated recovery is possible than traditional network.