A Software-Defined Networking-Driven Reliable Transmission Architecture for Enhancing Real-Time Video Streaming Quality

This article introduces a novel framework designed to enhance the reliability and quality of real-time video streaming by implementing a retransmission scheme that integrates the Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) and software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities. Conventional data transmission approaches, like those based on the TCP, often suffer from high latency and diminished reliability when managing multiple retransmission requests. To address these issues, we implemented the proposed framework in the SDN switches, including a retransmission mechanism that incorporates a buffering agent to mitigate packet loss. Moreover, by utilizing SDN controllers to create a reliable User Datagram Protocol scheme for efficient data transmission, the framework strengthens both practicality and reliability. The framework’s effectiveness is evaluated using three quality assessment metrics, and it demonstrates superior performance with a slight compromise in terms of latency compared to standard RTSP-based streaming.