An SDN-Driven Reliable Transmission Architecture for Enhancing Real-Time Video Streaming Quality

This paper 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 the software-defined network capabilities (SDN). Conventional data transmission approaches, like those based on 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 UDP scheme for efficient data transmission, the framework strengthens both practicality and reliability. The framework’s effectiveness is evaluated using 3 quality assessment metrics, and it demonstrates superior performance with a slight compromise in terms of latency compared to standard RTSP-based streaming. These findings suggest that the proposed solution offers a viable and efficient approach to improve real-time video streaming quality in scenarios where packet loss is prevalent.