A Multipath Transport Scheme for Real-Time Multimedia Services Based on Software-Defined Networking and Segment Routing

It is still a challenging task to provide satisfactory quality of experience (QoE) to users by traditional routing mechanism in current public Internet for real-time multimedia services with high bandwidth and strict end-to-end latency constraint. Multipath transmission is a promising way to improve the performance of data delivery, due to its advantage in bandwidth aggregation capacity over multiple paths to speed up high volume transfers between endpoints. However, existing multipath transmission has many disadvantages such as the requirements for end-host support (i.e. the necessary multi-homed network setting, and operating system or upper applications updates of user devices), and blindingly pursuing maximum of transmission throughput. Path allocation and end-to-end transmission control are two important factors affecting the quality of multipath transmission. As an emerging network architecture, software-defined networking (SDN) is flexible, manageable, and responsive to rapid changes in traffic requirements. In this paper, we propose a multipath transport scheme based on SDN with segment routing (SR) which can meet the bandwidth and low end-to-end transmission latency requirements of real-time interactive multimedia services. The centralized SDN controller is extended to allocate multiple disjoint paths meeting bandwidth requirement meanwhile balancing the network load. The proprietary multipath media server (MMS) dynamically controls the assignment between subflows and routing paths to reduce the end-to-end transmission latency and thus improve QoE of end-users. To show the feasibility of our approach, we construct an SDN platform using Mininet. Simulation results show that our approach performs better compared to the conventional approaches in terms of traffic balancing and end-to-end transmission delay.