  Many of the video streaming applications in today's Internet involve the
distribution of content from a CDN source to a large population of interested
clients. However, widespread support of IP multicast is unavailable due to
technical and economical reasons, leaving the floor to application layer
multicast which introduces excessive delays for the clients and increased
traffic load for the network. This paper is concerned with the introduction of
an SDN-based framework that allows the network controller to not only deploy IP
multicast between a source and subscribers, but also control, via a simple
northbound interface, the distributed set of sources where multiple-
description coded (MDC) video content is available. We observe that for medium
to heavy network loads, relative to the state-of-the-art, the SDN-based
streaming multicast video framework increases the PSNR of the received video
significantly, from a level that is practically unwatchable to one that has
good quality.
