IPv6 Flow-Label based Application Aware Routing in SDNs

Application-aware routing has been proposed to facilitate fine-grained control and better resource utilization in Wide Area Networks (WANs). However, there are two key challenges that impact the deployment of application-aware routing in a traditional network: (1) The run time identification of applications and (2) Routing mechanism that is specific to an application’s need. However, recent advancements in SDN technology and programmable switches paved a way towards feasible implementations of application-aware routing, by providing flexibility in data-plane for parsing; and in control-plane to employ appropriate routing algorithms.In this paper, we propose to use the IPv6 flow label for the identification of the applications at run time. We also present a link-weight-based routing mechanism that adapts itself for the traffic of different application categories and results in better throughput (>2x) as compared to the shortest path routing. We argue that the use of the IPv6 flow label for application identification also does not require any modification at the protocol and switch level in OpenFlow/P4 supporting hardware.