Abstract
Day after day, multimedia applications and services are becoming more and more popular, making the network traffic more detailed and complex. In this scenario, the multimedia content delivery is challenging and a proper method to increase the distribution efficiency is nearly mandatory. In this paper, we explore a multimedia gateway to enhance the multimedia content delivery in an OpenFlow Software-Defined Network (SDN) environment. On the network, the multimedia gateway acts as a complementary component of the OpenFlow controller and as a network gateway for the end-systems. The interactions with the OpenFlow controller occur via its northbound API. Through these interactions, with global information of the network, multimedia traffic flows can be routed and delivered differently from the other flows. Our evaluation experiments show that the multimedia gateway is able to identify and classify multiple multimedia traffic flows according to their service type (e.g., audio, voice, video or data), forward each traffic flow to the destination system according to specific flow rules, with different configurations of bandwidth allocation and of priority, and provide a caching service for the end-systems. These resources are important to improve the multimedia content delivery and distribution and to increase the user-perceived Quality of Experience (QoE).