Distributed QoS Architectures for Multimedia Streaming Over Software Defined Networks

This paper presents novel QoS extensions to distributed control plane architectures for multimedia delivery over large-scale, multi-operator Software Defined Networks (SDNs). We foresee that large-scale SDNs shall be managed by a distributed control plane consisting of multiple controllers, where each controller performs optimal QoS routing within its domain and shares summarized (aggregated) QoS routing information with other domain controllers to enable inter-domain QoS routing with reduced problem dimensionality. To this effect, this paper proposes (i) topology aggregation and link summarization methods to efficiently acquire network topology and state information, (ii) a general optimization framework for flow-based end-to-end QoS provision over multi-domain networks, and (iii) two distributed control plane designs by addressing the messaging between controllers for scalable and secure inter-domain QoS routing. We apply these extensions to streaming of layered videos and compare the performance of different control planes in terms of received video quality, communication cost and memory overhead. Our experimental results show that the proposed distributed solution closely approaches the global optimum (with full network state information) and nicely scales to large networks.