Genetic algorithm‐based routing method for enhanced video delivery over software defined networks

Video streaming has emerged as a killer application in today's Internet, delivering a tremendous amount of media contents to millions of users at any given time. Such a heavy traffic load demands an effective routing method. In this paper, an effective routing method, named GA‐SDN, is developed based on software defined network (SDN) technique. To facilitate the researchers in this field to evaluate the video delivery quality over SDN, an evaluation framework and its associated source codes are provided. The framework integrates the H.264 Scalable Video coding streaming Evaluation Framework (SVEF) with the Mininet emulator. Through this framework, video processing researchers can evaluate their proposed coding algorithms in an SDN‐enabled network emulator, while network operators or executives can evaluate the impact of real video streams on the developing network architectures or protocols. Experiment results demonstrate the usefulness of myEvalSVC_SDN and prove that GA‐SDN outperforms traditional Bellman‐Ford routing algorithm in terms of packet drop rate, throughput, and average peak signal‐to‐noise ratio.