A QoS Framework for SDN-Based Networks
Haitham Ghalwash, Chun-Hsi Huang · 2018
Nowadays, traditional networks are suffering from lack of information, easy management, and hard QoS guarantee. Recently, SDNs overcome these limitations. They provide network agility, programmability, and centralized network control. These features facilitate solving many of the security, performance, management and QoS issues. In this paper, we propose an SDN framework that leverages programmability and centralized control to provide a level of QoS. Knowing the state of the whole network helps optimizing the decision towards enhancing the network efficiency. The presented framework basically contains modules that provide monitoring, route determination, rule preparation, and configuration functionalities. The monitoring module analyzes ports utilization and probs the links delay. The route determination module relies on the shortest path algorithm, with or without QoS guarantee. Two QoS parameters, namely, port utilization and delay are considered in the monitoring and the route determination. The proposed framework is tested in a fat-tree topology with an OpenDayLight (ODL) controller. Experiments are conducted to prove the efficiency of the presented framework over the traditional standalone controller with the built-in features. Results showed that using the presented framework, with or without QoS reduces the overall average delay by 57%, jitter by 25% and packet loss by 67%. Moreover, the monitored port utilization was reduced by 30% on average.