RESEARCH ARTICLE Genetic algorithm‐based routing method for enhanced video delivery over software defined networks Yun‐Shuai Yu 1 | Chih‐Heng Ke 2 1 Department of Electronic Engineering, National Chin‐Yi University of Technology, Taichung 41170, Taiwan 2 Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Quemoy University, Kinmen 89250, Taiwan Correspondence Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Quemoy University Kinmen 89250, Taiwan. Email: smallko@gmail.com Summary Video streaming has emerged as a killer application in today's Internet, deliver- ing a tremendous amount of media contents to millions of users at any given time. Such a heavy traffic load demands an effective routing method. In this paper, an effective routing method, named GA‐SDN, is developed based on soft- ware defined network (SDN) technique. To facilitate the researchers in this field to evaluate the video delivery quality over SDN, an evaluation framework and its associated source codes are provided. The framework integrates the H.264 Scalable Video coding streaming Evaluation Framework (SVEF) with the Mininet emulator. Through this framework, video processing researchers can evaluate their proposed coding algorithms in an SDN‐enabled network emulator, while network operators or executives can evaluate the impact of real video streams on the developing network architectures or protocols. Experi- ment results demonstrate the usefulness of myEvalSVC_SDN and prove that GA‐SDN outperforms traditional Bellman‐Ford routing algorithm in terms of packet drop rate, throughput, and average peak signal‐to‐noise ratio. KEYWORDS genetic algorithm, routing, software defined network, video delivery 1 | INTRODUCTION Video streaming has become one of the prevalent network applications. However, video streaming has stringent delay requirements which cannot be guaranteed in the best‐effort Internet. In addition, most video contents are routed via shortest path first policy. If congestion happens in the shortest path, neither of them can achieve an acceptable streaming quality. Consequently, a path diver- sity scheme is required for video transmission. Neverthe- less, traditional routing schemes do not provide the path diversity. The emerging architecture of software defined network (SDN) 1 becomes a promising solution for the provision of path diversity. SDN decouples the control and forwarding logic from traditional routing devices into SDN controllers and network switches, respectively. Internet service providers (ISPs) can develop their own management applications, which communicates with the SDN controller by means of a so‐called Northbound API. Next, the SDN controller can communicate with net- work switches via a Southbound API for global network information collection and real‐time forwarding rule delivery. As a result, the management application can find out alternative paths to get rid of congested links with the help of global network information. When choosing an alternative path, Quality of Service (QoS) experienced by end users must be taken into con- sideration. There are two types of QoS. One is parameter- ized QoS and the other is prioritized QoS. Parameterized QoS is a strict QoS that data rate, delay bound, or jitter bound must be met for data transmission from sender to receiver. Therefore, there should be a signaling protocol Received: 15 July 2016 Revised: 16 April 2017 Accepted: 29 June 2017 DOI: 10.1002/dac.3391 Int J Commun Syst. 2017;e3391. https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.3391 Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac 1 of 13