The need for software defined mobile networking (SDMN) increases to manage the complexity in communication networks for the fifth generation mobile networks and beyond, with increasing diverse demand on data traffic in wireless environments. The separation of the data and control planes offers flexibility in future networks with SDMN by taking into account to the wireless access problem in complex radio environments. In this paper, we propose an efficient joint routing and resource allocation algorithm to minimize the cost based on power consumption while satisfying both throughput and delay requirement of the flows under a given capacity of links in night time traffic through SDMN. The power consumption is determined based on the number of active OpenFlow switches and active ports in the network. In the proposed joint algorithm, we put the selected network components to sleep mode in order to reduce overall network power consumption. The performances of the proposed algorithm are illustrated under different throughput constraints in various network topologies and scenarios in night-time traffic.

As SDN migrates to wide area networks and 5G core networks, a scalable, highly reliable, low latency distributed control plane becomes a key factor that differentiates operator solutions for network control and management. In order to meet the high reliability and low latency requirements under time-varying volume of control traffic, the distributed control plane, consisting of multiple controllers and a combination of out-of-band and in-band control channels, needs to be managed dynamically. To this effect, we propose a novel programmable distributed control plane architecture with a dynamically managed in-band control network, where in-band mode switches communicate with their controllers over a virtual overlay to the data plane with dynamic topology. We dynamically manage the number of controllers, switches, and control flows assigned to each controller as well as traffic over control channels achieving both controller and control traffic load-balancing. We introduce “control flow table” (rules embedded in the flow table of a switch to manage in-band control flows) in order to implement the proposed distributed dynamic control plane. We propose methods for off-loading congested controllers and congested in-band control channels using control flow tables. A validation test-bed and experimental results over multiple topologies are presented to demonstrate the scalability and performance improvements achieved by the proposed dynamic control plane management procedures when the controller CPU and/or availability or throughput of in-band control channels becomes bottlenecks.

In this study, we aim to analyze how Software Defined Networking (SDN) can help to ensure a high-quality uninterrupted Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service accompanied by video for prioritized users and entities in a network congested with background traffic. Guaranteeing a level of Quality of Service (QoS) and resource prioritization are key concepts for future networks (e.g., 5G, NGSON) and may be required in an emergency situation such as an international disaster recovery operation. Providing QoS in such scenarios with the help of SDN is promisingly feasible, via limiting bandwidth, assigning flows to different queues and/or adapting routing decisions based on network conditions. The experiments conducted throughout the study are the substances of the EC FP7 project OFERTIE and Celtic-Plus project SIGMONA. Here we compared loss rate, latency and the jitter as QoS metrics under several scenarios and results showed that we can flexibly manage the QoS by reducing more than 5% loss rate and more than 50% of latency and jitter.

OpenFlow is a clean-slate Future Internet architecture that decouples control and forwarding layers of routing, which has recently started being deployed throughout the world for research purposes. This paper presents an optimization framework for the OpenFlow controller in order to provide QoS support for scalable video streaming over an OpenFlow network. We pose and solve two optimization problems, where we route the base layer of SVC encoded video as a lossless-QoS flow, while the enhancement layers can be routed either as a lossy-QoS flow or as a best effort flow, respectively. The proposed approach differs from current QoS architectures since we provide dynamic rerouting capability possibly using non-shortest paths for lossless and lossy QoS flows. We show that dynamic rerouting of QoS flows achieves significant improvement on the video's overall PSNR under network congestion.

Three-dimensional (3-D) video is the next natural step in the evolution of digital media technologies. Recent 3-D autostereoscopic displays can display multiview video with up to 200 views. While it is possible to broadcast 3-D stereo video (two views) over digital TV platforms today, streaming over Internet Protocol (IP) provides a more flexible approach for distribution of stereo and free-view 3-D media to home and mobile with different connection bandwidths and different 3-D displays. Here, flexible transport refers to rate-scalable, resolution-scalable, and view-scalable transport over different channels including digital video broadcasting (DVB) and/or IP. In this paper, we first briefly review the state of the art in 3-D video formats, coding methods for different transport options and video formats, IP streaming protocols, and streaming architectures. We then take a look at beyond the state of the art in 3-D video transport research, including asymmetric stereoscopic video streaming, adaptive and peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming of multiview video, view-selective streaming and future directions in broadcast of 3-D media over IP and jointly over DVB and IP.

This paper presents a comparison of a wide set of MGS fragmentation configurations of SVC in terms of their PSNR performance, with the slice mode on or off, using multiple extraction methods. We also propose a priority-based hierarchical extraction method which outperforms other extraction schemes for most MGS configurations. Experimental results show that splitting the MGS layer into more than five fragments, when the slice mode is on, may result in noticeable decrease in the average PSNR. It is also observed that for videos with large key frame enhancement NAL units, MGS fragmentation and/or slice mode have positive impact on the PSNR of the extracted video at low bitrates. While using slice mode without MGS fragmentation may improve the PSNR performance at low rates, it may result in uneven video quality within frames due to varying quality of slices. Therefore, we recommend combined use of up to five MGS fragments and slice mode, especially for low bitrate video applications.

This paper aims to determine the best rate adaptation strategy to maximize the received video quality when streaming SVC video over the Internet. Different bandwidth estimation techniques are implemented for different transport protocols, such as using the TFRC rate when available or calculating the packet transmission rate otherwise. It is observed that controlling the rate of packets dispatched to the transport queue to match the video extraction rate resulted in oscillatory behavior in DCCP CCID3, decreasing the received video quality. Experimental results show that video should be sent at the maximum available network rate rather than at the extraction rate, provided that receiver buffer does not overflow. When the network is over-provisioned, the packet dispatch rate may also be limited with the maximum extractable video rate, to decrease the retransmission traffic without affecting the received video quality.

It is envisioned that access networks will be mostly wireless in the future. Hence, it is of interest to consider extensions of the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) for wireless networks. This paper focuses on the problems of video streaming over DCCP in the wireless domain and proposes a cross-layer solution in which the wireless packet loss information available in the Medium Access (MAC) layer is utilized by DCCP to distinguish congestion losses from wireless losses and behave accordingly. Tests performed with our modified DCCP confirm that using cross-layer loss information prevents unnecessary rate decreases and results in better video streaming experiences.

We propose a new adaptive streaming model that utilizes DCCP in order to efficiently stream stereoscopic video over the Internet for 3DTV transport. The model allocates the available channel bandwidth, which is calculated by the DCCP, among the views according to the suppression theory of human vision. The video rate is adapted to the DCCP rate for each group of pictures (GoP) by adaptive extraction of layers from a scalable multi-view bitstream. The objective of the streaming model is to maximize perceived quality of the received 3D video while minimizing the number of possible display interrupts. Experimental results successfully demonstrate stereo video streaming over DCCP on wide area network.

The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) is designed to be a replacement for the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) that is used for media delivery, with Congestion Control Identifier 3 (CCID3) tailored for video streaming applications. In this paper, we investigate the methods of streaming video, which is coded with the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC, over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and DCCP (using CCID3), and try to come up with a solution such that the quality of the received video is maximized while both the number and the length of buffering events are minimized.