Enabling Software Defined Networking with QoS Guarantee for Cloud Applications

Due to the centralized control, network-wide monitoring and flow-level scheduling of Software-Defined-Networking (SDN), it can be utilized to achieve Quality of Service (QoS) for cloud applications and services, such as voice over IP, video conference and online games, etc. However, most existing approaches stay at the QoS framework design and test level, while few works focus on studying the basic QoS techniques supported by SDN. In this paper, we enable SDN with QoS guaranteed abilities, which could provide end-to-end QoS routing for each cloud user service. First of all, we implement an application identification technique on SDN controller to determine required QoS levels for each application type. Then, we implement a queue scheduling technique on SDN switch. It queues the application flows into different queues and schedules the flows out of the queues with different priorities. At last, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed SDN-based QoS technique through an experimental analysis. Results show that when the output interface has sufficiently available bandwidth, the delay can be reduced by 28% on average. In addition, for the application flow with the highest priority, our methods can reduce 99.99% delay and increase 90.17% throughput on average when the output interface utilization approaches to the maximum bandwidth limitation.