Toward Building Video Multicast Tree with Congestion Avoidance Capability in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Network congestion is an obstacle to a Quality of Service (QoS) guarantee for online video applications, because it leads to a high packet loss rate and long transmission delay. In the Software-Defined Network (SDN), the controller can conveniently obtain the network topology and link bandwidth use situation. Based on the above advantages, an SDN-based video multicast routing solution, called Congestion Avoidance Video Multicast (CAVM), is proposed in this paper. CAVM obtains overall network topology, monitors available bandwidth resource and measures the link delays based on the OpenFlow, a popular SDN southbound interface. We introduce a novel multicast routing problem, named the Delay-Constrained and Minimum Congestion-Cost Multicast Routing (DCMCCMR) problem, which finds the multicast tree with the lowest congestion cost and a source-destination delay constraint in the SDN environment. The DCMCCMR problem is NP-hard. CAVM uses an algorithm to solve it in polynomial time. Our experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm can build multicast trees with good congestion avoidance capability