The hardware and software co-design of a configurable QoS for video streaming based on OpenFlow protocol and NetFPGA platform

In order to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of multimedia network, based on the concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow protocol, this paper presents the hardware and software co-design of a configurable QoS scheme for video streaming. Specifically, we present the architecture of an OpenFlow switch where the allocated network bandwidth for each multimedia traffic can be dynamically configured by the SDN controller. The detailed structures of software and hardware components are illustrated in this paper. For proof of concept, we realize the proposed switch based on a System on Chip (SoC) platform. We first implement a basic OpenFlow switch based on the state-of-the-art NetFPGA-CML platform. This design occupies 40% of total resources, and is promising for further researches and developments of multimedia networks. We realize the proposed OpenFlow switch with configurable QoS on this platform and carry practical experiments and measurements. The experimental results show that the proposed configurable QoS scheme enhances the QoS and received PSNR of the video streaming.