An Ensembled Scheme for QoS-Aware Traffic Flow Management in Software Defined Networks

In recent times, smart communities such as-smart grid, smart healthcare, and smart manufacturing units consists of large number of connected devices equipped with advanced processing and communication capabilities. The focus of these smart communities have shifted towards the use of intelligent processing and control for providing better quality of service (QoS) to the end user domain. To support this aspect, software defined networking (SDN) is being widely deployed in different domains such as-data center networks, fog/edge computing, smart grid, and vehicular networks. The variable requirements of different applications in smart communities make it necessary to deploy flexible and scalable SDN. The dynamic flow management capability of SDN has lots of potential that needs to be effectively explored in order to provide QoS guarantee for traffic generated from different smart applications. In this direction, in this paper, an ensembled scheme for QoS-aware traffic flow management in SDN is designed. The proposed scheme works in three phases: 1) a linear ordering scheme for dependency removal of the incoming packets is designed, 2) an application-specific traffic classification scheme is designed, and 3) a queue management scheme is designed for efficient scheduling of traffic flow. The proposed scheme is evaluated over an experimental setup. The results obtained shows that the proposed scheme behaves effectively with respect to different QoS parameters.