Joint content placement and traffic management for cloud mobile video distribution over software-defined networks

To cope with the rapid growth of mobile video, video providers have leveraged cloud technologies to deploy their mobile video service system for more cost-effective and scalable performance. The emergence of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides a promising solution to manage the underlying network. In this paper, we introduce an SDN-enabled cloud mobile video distribution architecture and propose a joint video placement, request dispatching and traffic management mechanism to improve user experience and reduce the system operational cost. We use a utility function to capture the two aspects of user experience: the level of satisfaction and average latency, and formulate the joint optimization problem as a mixed integer programming problem. We develop an optimal algorithm based on dual decomposition and prove its optimality. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and the results show that our strategy can effectively cut down the total cost and guarantee user experience.