Prototyping an SDN Control Framework for QoS Guarantees

The centralized control capability of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) gives us an excellent opportunity to enhance the Quality of Service (QoS) routing. The end-to-end QoS-aware traffic forwarding must consider the computation latency associated with optimal path selection while reducing the controller’s response time. In this paper, we propose a new SDN controller framework that consists of a queueing mechanism, active link delay measurements, efficient statistic estimate of network states, and intelligent path computation and selection. We implement our framework as a modular application in a Floodlight SDN controller software and conduct comprehensive experimental studies on the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) testbed. Our performance evaluation based on experimental results demonstrates that the proposed framework can significantly reduce the latency in both the control plane and data plane, and find optimal paths with the minimum end-to-end delay.