Packet Scheduling for Multiple-Switch Software-Defined Networking in Edge Computing Environment

Software-defined networking (SDN) decouples the control plane and data forwarding plane to overcome the limitations of traditional networking infrastructure. Among several communication protocols employed for SDN, OpenFlow is most widely used for the communication between the controller and switch. In this paper two packet scheduling schemes, FCFS-Pushout (FCFS-PO) and FCFS-Pushout-Priority (FCFS-PO-P), are proposed to effectively handle the overload issue of multiple-switch SDN targeting the edge computing environment. Analytical models on their operations are developed, and extensive experiment based on a testbed is carried out to evaluate the schemes. They reveal that both of them are better than the typical FCFS-Block (FCFS-BL) scheduling algorithm in terms of packet wait time. Furthermore, FCFS-PO-P is found to be more effective than FCFS-PO in the edge computing environment