Improving video transmission in software defined wired and wireless networks using multi-path transmission

Abstract

Recently, increasing attention has been paid to the study of applying software defined networks to improve video transmission. Compared with the existing studies which focus on a wired network, this study proposed a multi-path transmission mechanism for improving the performance of transmitting videos from a wired network to a wireless one in a software defined network environment. In the proposed mechanism, a mobile host could apply network bonding to integrate several physical or virtual wireless network modules, each of which was connected to a different access point, into a combined device. Thus, multiple wireless links of the mobile host could be established and hence multiple transmission paths from the video source in the wired network to the mobile host were derived. In addition, different amount of video packets were allocated onto different transmission paths so as to maximize the performance of the multi-path transmission. According to the results of our experiments, the proposed mechanism can enhance the performance of transmission in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR).