An SDN approach to adaptive Video Streaming in Wireless home networks

Adaptive video streaming techniques were introduced to enable high quality video delivery over HTTP. These schemes propose to choose dynamically the appropriate video rate to match the operating conditions. In home networks, wireless access is the predominant Internet access. Multiple clients/players with different link qualities compete over a limited wireless bandwidth to transfer their video streams. As a result, some users undergo unpredictable degradations of their Quality of Experience (QoE) while others benefit from these perturbations. In this paper we introduce a new technique to address this issue at the gateway without modifying neither the client nor the video server side. We design a framework WNAVS (Wireless Network Assisted Video Streaming) that relies on the deployment of Software Defined Networking (SDN). WNAVS performs a dynamic traffic shaping based on collected network traffic statistics and allocates bandwidth for the clients in real time. We evaluate WNAVS over several metrics: fairness, instability, average video quality as well as the video traffic utilization. Our results demonstrate an improvement for all these parameters.