QoS-Aware Multicast for Scalable Video Streaming in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Scalable Video Coding (SVC) is a promising coding technique that enables flexible video transmission to support heterogeneous devices. However, the current best-effort delivery model characterized by the Internet cannot fully exploit the scalability feature of SVC because the network nodes are transparent for multimedia streaming applications. Software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged as an innovative network paradigm that decouples the control and forwarding planes while routing. This architecture with the OpenFlow protocol enables network operators to obtain per-flow QoS control in a more scalable, flexible, and finely granular manner compared to the conventional network architecture. Inspired by these facts, this paper designs a comprehensive QoS-aware multicast scheme for scalable video streaming over SDN networks. First, we present the designed multimedia streaming multicast system architecture and formulate the QoS-aware multicast routing problem as a non-linear programming model. We then propose a fundamental tree construction algorithm that decomposes the video streaming requests into subrequests and serves them in a bottom-up manner. Furthermore, we design a layer switching strategy based on the video distortion model to mitigate network-induced video quality distortion. Finally, the experimental results are presented to validate the performance of our methods in terms of scalability, network utility, video playout quality, and playback interruption ratio.