A Congestion Contribution-based Traffic Engineering Scheme using Software-Defined Networking

Abstract

This paper proposes a Traffic Engineering (TE) scheme for routing in a target network topology that supports OpenFlow using a metric called congestion contribution and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). According to the network traffic volume has been increasing dramatically, it is clear that the congestion, which is caused by the imbalance of the traffic flow, can be occurred. Furthermore, an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) that is used for an Autonomous System (AS) also can cause congestion because it uses snapshot information of network topology to make the shortest path-based routing table. Due to the reasons mentioned above, much research on TE has been conducting to enhance the network performance. However, as an example of TE, the Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) using Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) is not flexible in reconfiguring the labeled path, and it has resource overhead that cannot be ignored. Thus, we propose a TE scheme using SDN to overcome the limitations in the target network. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed scheme, TE application predicts the bandwidth utilization for network devices in SDN networks. It also determines the near-optimized routing path for the maximization of the average bandwidth utilization with avoiding the congestion nodes. Our scheme can configure network devices (e.g., SDN switches) along the paths of traffic flows so that the SDN network can have maximum bandwidth utilization. Through experiments, it is shown that our proposed scheme can utilize the average bandwidth of the whole topology up to 66%.