Video Streaming Evaluation Using Priority Queuing in P4 Programmable Networks

There is an increasing popularity of domain-specific languages such as P4 and of the capability to write code for improving the device performance. Therefore, the time-critical traffic becomes decisive to avoid network and service disruption due to a poor implementation. To handle real-time traffic and latency-sensitive applications (e.g., video streaming) in a Software-Defined Network (SDN) environment, the trustworthy and secure mechanisms are needed to guarantee a minimum end-to-end delay and to manage response time. This paper presents a P4-based switch solution to improve the data-control performance and to provide efficient queuing in SDN. Additionally, we studied how priority queuing mechanisms can help in achieving a solid video quality. In contradiction, a poor network implementation can lead to a longer network delay, which can make the video unplayable. The network was developed using the Behavioral Model v2 of the P4 language.