Performance Analysis of Quality of Service in Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking strategy designed to overcome issues experienced in traditional IP network e.g. high level of complexity and inability to adaptively respond to newly arisen Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in a timely fashion. In SDN, control plane and data plane are decoupled which justifies the need to have a central controller to receive the application requirements (e.g. Quality of Service requirements) and implements a set of network policies on the data plane to eventually satisfy the requirements of the application. Implementing a proper set of policies on data plane can be quite a challenging task. In many cases implementing a set of policies in order to satisfy the requirements of an application negates requirements of other applications. In this paper, a simulation study is conducted to evaluate the performance of a QoS policy (i.e. reserving bandwidth) on a specific type of multimedia traffic (e.g. video, audio and data) and its influences on other types of multimedia traffic. The outcome of the simulation study has motivated the authors to conduct a mathematical analysis on the sensitivity of network applications over all possible combination of network policies to eventually implement a proper set of policies that imposes minimum destructive impact on other network applications or services.