Direct data flow bandwidth evaluation in SDN environment

Abstract

With the growing popularity of multimedia services, it is increasingly difficult to ensure their quality in traditional networks. The software-defined network (SDN) model provides a way to programmatically configure switches during operation and manage network resources more efficiently. Thanks to the properties of the software-defined networks where the hardware part is separated from the software, we can access advanced data stream control in multipath networks. A common method on evaluating the bandwidth consumed by a given data flow in the SDN environment is by collecting the statistics from the OpenFlow enabled switches. This method, however, seems to be insufficient to be used with the multimedia data sessions in the real-time, since the time required to get reliable value about the new data flow is approximately 1 second or more. In this article, we took a look at measuring the data flows directly by mirroring the data flow traffic to modified network controller untill we have the precise value of bandwidth used by the flow. This approach resulted in fastest and more accurate flow bandwidth evaluations compared to those collected via OpenFlow.