A general QoS aware flow-balancing and resource management scheme in distributed software-defined networks

Abstract

Due to the limited service capabilities of centralized controllers, it is difficult to process high volume of flows within reasonable time. This particularly degrades the strict quality of service (QoS) requirements of interactive media applications, which is non-negligible factor. To alleviate this concern, distributed deployments of software-defined network (SDN) controllers are inevitable and have gained a predominant position. However, to maintain application specific QoS requirements, the number of resources used in network directly impacts the capital and operational expenditure. Hence, in distributed SDN architectures, issues such as flow arrival rate, resources required and operational cost have significant mutual dependencies on each other. Therefore, it is essential to research feasible methods to maintain QoS and minimize resources provisioning cost. Motivated from this, we propose a solution in a distributed SDN architectures that provides flow-balancing (with guaranteed QoS) in pro-active operations of SDN controllers, and attempts to optimize the use of instance resources provisioning costs. We validate our solution using the tools of queuing theory. Our studies indicate that with our solution, a network with minimum resources and affordable cost with guaranteed application QoS can be set-up