A new traffic engineering approach for QoS provisioning and failure recovery in SDN-based ISP networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new SDN (Software Defined Networking) controller design that jointly addresses the problems of optimal traffic engineering (TE), quality of service (QoS) provisioning and failure recovery in ISP (Internet Service Provider) networks. The control logic of the controller is divided into the offline and online component. The online component handles dynamic arrivals of users' requests in accordance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The offline component is responsible for periodic optimization of traffic distribution in the network. The goal of such architecture is to increase acceptance ratio for QoS requests and minimize degradation of background (best-effort) traffic in a scalable manner. Our simulation study has shown that the proposed solution outperforms the competitive one, which is commonly used in MPLS-based ISP networks, even when TE optimization is repeated after relatively long time intervals. This alleviates concerns regarding the scalability of the SDN control plane in large-scale ISP networks.