Adaptive Video Streaming over OpenFlow Networks with Quality of Service

Multimedia streaming applications have stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements which cannot be always met by the best-effort Internet. To provide QoS, several QoS architectures have been explored over last two decades, but none of them has been truly successful and globally implemented. This thesis presents a novel QoS architecture for multimedia streaming based on OpenFlow, a Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm that has already attracted many commercial vendors and recently being deployed throughout the world. We leverage off OpenFlow’s enhanced network control capabilities to deliver multimedia with QoS. On top of OpenFlow, we propose an optimization framework for dynamic QoS routing which fulfills the required end-to-end QoS by dynamically optimizing the routes of the multimedia traffic. Our extensive simulation results show that the proposed architecture and the optimization framework on routing significantly improve the QoS of the multimedia streaming compared to traditional shortest path routing in the Internet. In addition, we extend our framework for large scale multi-domain OpenFlow networks. We propose a distributed control plane architecture and present new methods for dynamic inter-domain QoS routing by addressing the messaging between OpenFlow controllers and the network scalability. We show that the proposed solution to the distributed routing closely approaches the globally optimal routing and nicely scales to large networks. We also implement a controller software to demonstrate the performance of our approach over a real OpenFlow network deployed in our campus. Our experimental results on the real network acknowledge our simulation results and show that we can guarantee seamless video delivery with little or no video artifacts experienced by the end users.