SDN@Play: A Multicast Rate Adaptation Mechanism for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

Live multimedia applications have experienced a dramatic growth due to the development of High Definition (HD) contents. Most of these streams are targeted at groups of people, who usually use Wi-Fi networks to access the platforms. In this context, a renewed interest in multicast applications has arisen, which usually suffer low data rates and reliability issues. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has revolutionized the traditional network architecture management, hence allowing for new ways to address the most challenging network constraints. In this paper, SDN@Play is presented as an SDN-based algorithm to dynamically adapt the multicast data rate. The implementation over a real-world testbed has proved that this solution is able to outperform the channel occupancy rate of the IEEE 802.11 standard, while keeping the the reliability of the transmission. We release the entire implementation including the controller and the data-path under a permissive license for academic use.

Publication
Proc. of IEEE CCNC. Las Vegas, NV, USA