Rate adaptive multicast video streaming over software defined network

Multicasting has always been a topic of importance when it comes to multiple receiving users. The participants are heterogeneous in terms of their capacity to process the video data and network technology. This capability difference affects the QoS and QoE of multicast video communication. In this work, we have developed a rate adaptive streaming mechanism to stream the video to meet the device and network constraints. The method uses SIP and SDP protocols to learn device constraints and link statistics to estimate the network resources. Later, this information is made available to the adaptation module to decide the video rate for streaming. We have implemented the method in the floodlight controller and streamed multiple rates of video over an SDN enabled network. The objective quality of the video is used for analysing the performance of the proposed adaptation technique.