QoS-aware flexible traffic engineering with OpenFlow-assisted agile IP-forwarding interchanging

In this paper, we propose to use IP-forwarding interchanging (i.e., exchanging packets between IPv4 and IPv6 according to the network status) enabled by OpenFlow to realize quality-of-service (QoS) aware flexible traffic engineering (F-TE) in a hybrid network where IPv4 and IPv6 coexist. Specifically, we have different IP domains interconnected by OpenFlow switches managed by a centralized controller, and design the network system to facilitate online, adaptive and per-flow-based IP-forwarding interchanging for link utilization optimization with the considerations on applications' QoS requirements. We implement the design in a semi-practical network testbed, and demonstrate the advantages of F-TE with experiments that include simultaneous video streaming and file transfer.

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