An Intelligent Scheme for the Identification of QoS Violations in Virtualized Environments

Current networking applications involve the definition and utilization of multiple virtualized resources on top of the available infrastructure. Software defined networks increase the performance compared with legacy systems as any functionality is managed through software. Securing the quality of service in such environments is significant to support novel applications that deliver their results in real time. In this paper, we propose a monitoring mechanism that observes the performance of the virtualized resources and identifies possible quality of service violations. Our model can be applied to any application domain, however, it is adapted to virtualized resources. We rely on a simple model that collects performance data, focuses on multiple parts of a virtualized functions chain and immediately concludes potential violations in real time. The proposed mechanism is incorporated in an SDN controller that is responsible to manage the virtualized resources. We provide an analytical description of the model and through a large set of simulations, we reveal its performance. Our results exhibit the timely identification of quality of service violations even in very dynamic environments where the performance of the network changes continuously.