Towards application driven networking

In order to address the performance problems that many business applications are experiencing, network vendors and Network Service Providers are reconsidering the integration of some form of application awareness in the way their networks forward user traffic. Their ultimate goal is to devise new network service models that are dedicated and customized to applications. This trend is mainly enabled by the emergence of software-Defined networking (SDN), which allows for flexible flow-based forwarding. This paper proposes an SDN-based Application Driven Network (ADN) that deploys customized data paths on an application basis, that the ADN is able to adapt to meet the, potentially, varying Quality of Service (QoS) needs of applications. These needs are, either, explicitly expressed and submitted by the middleware or by an application agent, or inferred by the proposed ADN with DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) based traffic classification techniques. This paper presents the general architecture of our proposed ADN by describing its main components, their requirements as well as their main algorithms. The proposed ADN has been implemented, evaluated and applied to the OMG Data Distribution Service (DDS) based distributed applications in an enterprise network context.