Model-based flow delegation for improving SDN infrastructure compatibility

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) allows fine granular control by applications running in the network control plane, facilitating the management, orchestration, and deployment of network services. However, the diversity of application, protocols, and switches makes the task of developing applications for such networks very complex. Besides, such heterogeneity makes it harder to support the manifold requirements that may arise from different control plane applications and to verify if the underlying infrastructure satisfies the requirements from these applications. In this paper, we propose a two-phase solution for this problem, extending the Model-Driven Networking (MDN) framework for: i) enabling it to model infrastructure capabilities, so that we can verify if these capabilities could satisfy applications requirements; and ii) applying a flow delegation technique to leverage the set of network capabilities in order to support applications requirements. Our experiments demonstrate that our flow delegation mechanism not only improves the network compatibility but also achieves better bandwidth usage and jitter ratios ^22% lower when considering QoS requirements.