Dynamic Quality of Service in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Quality of service is a necessary function of today’s networks. A proper quality of service ensures that packets are delivered effectively and fast. In traditional networks, quality of service has to be manually configured on each piece of hardware in the network. This manual procedure makes the process of implementing a quality of service in a network costly. Not to mention, if part of the configuration is incorrect, or a mistake is made during the configuration, everything must be corrected on each piece of affected hardware. In this paper, I will be exploring the effect of using a software-defined network controller and a quality of service to handle certain flows of traffic in a network. The main tool used is the OpenFlow defined queue. Queues and flow rules will allow a switch to control individual flows and the network resources that each flow consumes. Factors that will be explored are the bandwidth usage of a flow and the time taken by the network to implement new flow rules. While bandwidth usage is taken into account in traditional networks, changing a quality of service is a new dynamic.