WoS-CoMS: Work Stealing-Based Congestion Management Scheme for SDN Programmable Networks

In recent years, the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm emerged as an easy way to manage large-scale network infrastructures through programmability brought out and its control plane/data plane decoupling logic. This allows infrastructure and service providers to better deploy, configure and automate their traffic management policies and network equipments. However, congestion control remains a concern due to the evolution of increasingly complex and resource-intensive user requirements [(virtual reality, metaverse, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud,...] on network infrastructures. This server state leads to high latency in request processing and data loss. This paper proposes, in such a controller-supervised environment, a congestion management scheme within network service servers to maintain an acceptable quality of service. The strategy relies on work stealing to ensure a better workload balance. Simulations show that the proposed solution can reduce congestion load on the servers by up to 22%, depending on the request grain size, with shorter latency than other works in the literature. Moreover, the proposed solution allows stolen tasks to be completed within a shorter time frame.