Providing QoS to High Performance Distributed Applications in Software-Defined Networks (SDNs)

Nowadays, there is an ever-increasing number of applications that have strict quality of service (QoS) requirements. The ability to define QoS requirements in traditional networks is limited due to the complex control of these environments. Modification of the existing infrastructure has high administrative costs, since the subsystem of each service component must have its resources managed by a centralized organization to guarantee users the level of QoS that each of them requires. The specification of quality of service (QoS) requirements in traditional networks is limited by the high administrative cost of these environments. Nevertheless, newer network paradigms, as Software-Defined Networks (SDNs), simplify and relaxes the management of networks. In this sense, SDN can provide a simple/effective way to develop QoS provisioning. This approach allows the specification of classes of service and also negotiates the QoS requirements between applications and the SDN network controller. The SDN controller, in turn, monitors the network and adjusts its performance through resource reservation and traffic prioritization. Have developed a QoS provision architecture for high performance distributed applications exploiting the capabilities of SDN. In this architecture, simple software components enable a process of message exchanging that includes reservation request and reservation confirmation. This procedure allows a network controller to configure QoS queues to individual packet flows. The developed a proof-of-concept of proposal and experimental results show that the additional routines present low overhead, whereas – for a given test application — observes a reduction of up to 47% in transfer times. Despite the specific scenario evaluated, results indicate our solution feasibility. Future works include the development of renegotiation and adaptation functions.