Multimedia Delivery Techniques over Software-Defined Networks: A Survey

In the recent years, many solutions have been proposed to deliver multimedia over the best-effort Internet. The objective of these approaches is to ensure high Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) for multimedia delivery in the presence of bandwidth fluctuations made by factors like signal propagation and network congestion. However, many of these techniques faces severe limitations such as network bottleneck and congestion due to the lack of global network view. The separation of control logic and data plane in Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture contributes to the smartness, flexibility, and controllability of computer networks and provides new opportunities for guaranteeing higher QoE for multimedia viewers. In this survey, we present a taxonomy of the state-of-art SDN-based solutions for multimedia communications and we shed light on the research gaps in this area.