Video streaming over software defined networks with server load balancing

Software Defined Networking is a promising Internet architecture to deliver multimedia with end-to-end quality of service (QoS) since it enables optimal dynamic management of network resources and on-demand QoS provisioning by a network operator. We propose a framework for server load-balancing over a single-operator OpenFlow network to improve the quality of service levels of video streaming services. We design a new OpenFlow controller application for dynamic server load balancing by continuous monitoring of load of each video server and dynamic rerouting of clients to alternate servers with lower loads when an overload condition is detected. The proposed controller application is implemented on top of an open source OpenDaylight controller. Our results show that the proposed load-balancer improves the quality of streaming video experienced by end-users, and OpenFlow provides a powerful framework to provide video services with end-to-end quality of service over the future Internet.

1 Introduction

Over the past decade, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has explored several Quality of Service (QoS) architectures over the current Internet, but none has been truly successful and globally implemented. This is because QoS architectures such as IntServ [1] and Diffserv [2] are built on top of the current Internet's completely distributed hop-by-hop routing architecture, lacking a broader picture of overall network resources. Although tunneling with MPLS [3] provides a partial solution, it lacks real-time reconfigurability and adaptivity. As a result, in the current Internet, methods to provide some quality of service is often addressed at the application layer but without end-to-end service level guarantees. In contrast, Software Defined Networking is a promising Internet architecture to deliver multimedia with end-to-end quality of service (QoS) since it enables optimal dynamic management of network resources and on-demand QoS provisioning by a network operator. Fig. 1.

Openflow architecture.