QoS-aware multipath routing in software-defined networks

Abstract

The emergence of new applications, such as online gaming and virtual reality, necessitates the underlying network capable of fulfilling high bandwidth and low latency requirements. The software-defined multipath routing is a viable approach to fulfill such quality-of-service (QoS) requirements by improving the data delivery performance through multipath. In this paper, we propose a QoS-aware dynamic multipath routing scheme for enhancing QoS of high-bandwidth applications in an SDN-enabled network. The proposed scheme consists of three phases – flow splitting, multipath routing, and flow reordering. In the first phase, we propose a flow splitting scheme to decide how to split the incoming flows to enable multipath routing in the network. In the second phase, we design a cost function for routing the splittable subflows and formulate a min-cost routing problem as an integer linear program (ILP). To solve the problem in polynomial time, we propose a greedy heuristic approach. Finally, in the third phase, we propose a flow reordering scheme for the received subflows through multiple paths to maintain the desired flow sequence at the destination. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves higher network throughput by 22% compared to the benchmark schemes. Further, the proposed scheme achieves a reduction in QoS violated flows by 24% compared to the benchmark schemes.