A policy based framework for quality of service management in software defined networks

Abstract

Growth in multimedia trafc over the Internet increases congestion in the network architecture. Software-Defned Networking (SDN) is a novel paradigm that solves the congestion problem and allows the network to be dynamic, intelligent, and it centrally controls the network devices. SDN has many advantages in comparison to traditional networks, such as separation of forwarding and control plane from devices, global centralized control, management of network trafc. We design a policybased framework to enhance the Quality of Service (QoS) of multimedia trafc fows in a potential SDN environment. We phrase a max-fow-min-cost routing problem to determine the routing paths and presented a heuristic method to route the trafc fows in the network in polynomial time. The framework monitors the QoS parameters of trafc fows and identifes policy violations due to link congestion in the network. The introduced approach dynamically implements policy rules to SDN switches upon detection of policy violations and reroutes the trafc fows. The results illustrate that the framework achieves a reduction in end-to-end delay, average jitter, and QoS violated fows by 24%, 37%, and 25%, respectively, as compared to the Delay Minimization method. Furthermore, the proposed approach has achieved better results when compared to SDN without policy-based framework and reduced end-to-end delay, average jitter, and QoS violated fows by 51%, 62%, and 28%, respectively.