SDN Based Architecture to Improve Video Streaming in Home Networks

Nowadays, Internet video is the dominant internet traffic. DASH is an adaptive video streaming technique introduced to enable high quality video delivery over HTTP. In home networks, multiple video streams will compete for bandwidth, thus leading to poor performance and impacting the received quality of experience. In this paper we introduce a new technique to address this issue at the home network gateway without modifying neither the client player nor the video server. We design our framework NAVS (Network Assisted Video Streaming) relies on the deployment of Software Defined Networking (SDN). NAVS performs a dynamic traffic shaping based on the collected network traffic statistics and monitoring of video flows. NAVS dynamically allocates bandwidth for each video flow in real time. NAVS scheme has been evaluated over several metrics: bandwidth utilization, instability of players as well as the average video quality received by the clients. Our results demonstrate an improvement for all these parameters.