The QueuePusher: Enabling Queue Management in OpenFlow

Abstract

The evolution of Software-Defined Networking and the overall acceptance of protocols such as OpenFlow, demonstrates the added value of decoupling the data plane from the control plane. Existing SDN Controllers enable the expected flexibility from such networks by dynamically providing a fine-grained control of each flow. However, hardware-specific configurations, such as the creation of queues or other mechanisms is out of the scope of these controllers. This work presents an extension to a well known OpenFlow controller (Floodlight) to efficiently handle the management of Traffic Control Queues in OpenFlow switches, resorting to a RESTful northbound interface. The obtained results demonstrate further possibility of developing innovative on-demand resource reservation mechanisms in SDN without adding unbearable overheads.