A Reinforcement Learning-Based Routing for Real-Time Multimedia Traffic Transmission over Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

Recently, video streaming services consumption has grown massively and is foreseen to increase even more in the future. The tremendous traffic usage has negatively impacted the network’s quality of service due to network congestion and end-to-end customers’ satisfaction represented by the quality of experience, especially during evening peak hours. This paper introduces an intelligent multimedia framework that aims to optimise the network’s quality of service and users’ quality of experience by taking into account the integration of Software-Defined Networking and Reinforcement Learning, which enables exploring, learning, and exploiting potential paths for video streaming flows. Moreover, an objective study was conducted to assess video streaming for various realistic network environments and under low and high traffic loads to obtain two quality of experience metrics; video multimethod assessment fusion and structural similarity index measure. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed solution strategy, which demonstrated better viewing quality by achieving better customers’ quality of experience, higher throughput and lower data loss compared with the currently existing solutions.