Software defined networking for video: Overview & multicast study

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an architectural trend in networking towards the use of centralized controllers to improve global visibility and simplify various network operation tasks. Due to their need for QoS, sizable traffic involved, and dynamic nature, video applications are particularly suitable candidates for dynamic interaction with SDN. This paper provides an overview of different general ways that video applications have interacted with networks, and outline what opportunities SDN provides. We then develop and evaluate several methods that exploit SDN to construct multicast video trees and show that over realistic topology, SDN optimized trees can support 60-90% more traffic.