Application-Network Collaboration Using SDN for Ultra-Low Delay Teleorchestras

Abstract: Networked Music Performance (NMP) constitutes a class of ultra-low delay sensitive applications, allowing geographically separate musicians to perform seamlessly as a tele-orchestra. For this application type, the QoS indicator is the mouth-to-ear delay, which should be kept under 25 milliseconds. The mouth-to-ear delay comprises signal processing latency and network delay. We propose a strong collaboration between the network and NMP applications to \emph{actively} keep the to mouth-to-ear delay minimal, using direct state notifications. Related approaches can be characterized as \emph{passive}, since they try to estimate the network state indirectly, based on the end application performance. Our solution employs Software Defined Networking (SDN) to implement the network-to-application collaboration, being facilitated by the well-defined network interface that SDN offers. Emulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves an improvement of up to 59% in mouth-to-ear delay over the existing passive solutions.