SDNDASH: Improving QoE of HTTP Adaptive Streaming Using Software Defined Networking

HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is being adopted with increasing frequency and becoming the de-facto standard for video streaming. However, the client-driven, on-off adaptation behavior of HAS results in uneven bandwidth competition and this is exacerbated when a large number of clients share the same bottleneck network link and compete for the available bandwidth. With HAS each client independently strives to maximize its individual share of the available bandwidth, which leads to bandwidth competition and a decrease in end-user quality of experience (QoE). The competition causes scalability issues, which are quality instability, unfair bandwidth sharing and network resource underutilization. We propose a new software defined networking (SDN) based dynamic resource allocation and management architecture for HAS systems, which aims to alleviate these scalability issues and improve the per-client QoE. Our architecture manages and allocates the network resources dynamically for each client based on its expected QoE. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture significantly enhances scalability by improving per-client QoE by at least 30% and supporting up to 80% more clients with the same QoE compared to the conventional schemes.