Multipath Congestion Aware Routing–Based Audio Conference Application for Reliable Data Delivery in SDN Using AWGO Model

ABSTRACT The significant increase in network users has driven the evolution of networking models like virtualization of the network and cloud computing, resulting in a significant increase in heterogeneous network traffic. Ensuring quality of service (QoS) for real‐time and latency‐sensitive traffic, such as audio conferencing, requires intelligent routing mechanisms that manage congestion and resource allocation effectively. Therefore, this paper proposes a multipath congestion‐aware routing based on the Aquila Wild Geese Optimization (AWGO) model for feasible and reliable data delivery for audio conferencing data in Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) environments. The proposed AWGO is a hybrid optimization approach that integrates the strong global exploration and fast exploitation capabilities of the Aquila Optimizer (AO) with the stability, robustness, and scalability of the Wild Geese Algorithm (WGA) for exploring and optimizing multiple routing paths. Here, an audio conferencing application‐based Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) simulation with OpenFlow is implemented, wherein audio conferencing data are considered as sensitive data. The multiobjective fitness function evaluates candidate paths based on residual energy, distance, link quality, delay, traffic bandwidth, congestion level, data priority, and throughput. A fault‐tolerance mechanism is further incorporated to ensure routing robustness under node failure conditions. The performance of the AWGO is evaluated under different traffic conditions including best effort traffic, sensitive traffic, and unwanted traffic. The AWGO demonstrates enhanced performance, achieving a maximum throughput of 430.71 Kbps, computation time of 9.408 s, bandwidth utilization of 96% under best effort traffic, minimum packet loss of 0.101% and delay of 0.087 ms with sensitive traffic, and a jitter of 5.938 ms for unwanted traffic. This demonstrates that the proposed AWGO model is an efficient and scalable solution for reliable data delivery in SDN.