Employing SDN to control video streaming applications in military mobile networks

Video streaming is an important service provided by surveillance systems to enhance situation awareness. However, in military systems, data acquisition heavily depends on the network infrastructure. In this application domain, units are spread and the distance between the sources of data and the decision makers may be very large. In the case of video streaming, the demand for high network throughput poses some extra requirements on the network. Considering the mobility patterns of the military units and the diversity of the new generations of sensors, especially those used by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), the configuration and the management of the network must be so dynamic and so sensitive to data flow parameters that manual configuration is not acceptable. For this reason, the capability of the network to configure itself to offer the necessary Quality of Service is a must. Using principles of Software Defined Networks (SDN), this paper presents an analysis of video streaming for military surveillance in which multiple UAVs are employed as data providers through an SDN-enabled network, with promising results.