A Novel QoE-Centric SDN-based Multipath Routing Approach for Multimedia Services over 5G Networks

The explosion of enhanced applications such as live video streaming, video gaming and Virtual Reality calls for efforts to optimize transport protocols to manage the increasing amount of data traffic on future 5G networks. Through bandwidth aggregation over multiple paths, the Multi-Path Transmission Control Protocol (MPTCP) can enhance the performance of network applications. MPTCP can split a large multimedia flow into subflows and apply a congestion control mechanism on each subflow. Segment Routing (SR), a promising source routing approach, has emerged to provide advanced packet forwarding over 5G networks. In this paper, we explore the utilization of MPTCP and SR in SDN-based networks to improve network resources utilization and end-user's QoE for delivering multimedia services over 5G networks. We propose a novel QoE-aware, SDN-based MPTCP/SR approach for service delivery. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implemented an intelligent QoE-centric Multipath Routing Algorithm (QoMRA) on an SDN source routing platform using Mininet and POX controller. We carried out experiments on Dynamic Adaptive video Steaming over HTTP (DASH) applications over various network conditions. The preliminary results show that, our QoE-aware SDN-based MPTCP/SR scheme performs better compared to the conventional TCP approach in terms of throughput, link utilization and the end-user's QoE.