Joint resource allocation and traffic management for cloud video distribution over software-defined networks

The rapid progress of cloud technology has attracted a growing number of video providers to deploy their streaming services onto multiple distributed datacenters for more cost-effective performance. The emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology overcomes the limitation of the existing network and provides a promising solution to manage the underlying network. In this paper, we introduce an SDN-enabled cloud video distribution architecture and propose a joint resource allocation and traffic management mechanism to improve user experience and reduce the system operational cost. We use a delay utility function to represent user experience and formulate the joint optimization problem as a convex optimization problem. We conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of our algorithm and the results show that our strategy can effectively cut down the total cost and guarantee user experience.