Edge-assisted Traffic Engineering and applications in the IoT
Nikos Fotiou, Dimitrios Mendrinos, George C. Polyzos · 2018
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) promises novel traffic engineering capabilities transforming every network from a mere packet forwarding fabric into an intelligent distribution medium. We extend the functionality of the core SDN component, the SDN controller, to perform path computations over "annotated" topologies. Specifically, we exploit the use of tags, which describe network node properties and capabilities, enabling a new type of network control applications and thus connecting user applications and traffic flows with network decisions and management. Tags can be set and modified in a number of different ways, supporting context awareness and cognition in the network in a lightweight and loosely integrated way. Intelligent applications running at edge nodes may request unicast, anycast, or multicast paths among nodes with specific tags or tag properties, realizing efficiently traffic engineering goals and supporting network slicing, virtualization, finer resource control, and easier management. We illustrate this new capability in the IoT domain by demonstrating how CoAP group communication can be implemented in a seamless, lightweight, and efficient way, releasing the constrained endpoints from the requirement to support IP multicast.