A Rate Allocation Framework for Multi-Class Services in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Software defined networking (SDN) is a network architecture with a programmable control plane (e.g., controllers) and simple data plane (e.g., forwarders). One of the popular SDN protocols/standards is OpenFlow, for which researchers have recently proposed some quality-of-service (QoS) supports. However, the proposals for rate allocation have some limitations in network scalability and multi-class services' supports. In the literature, rate allocation formulations are commonly based on the framework of network utility maximization (NUM). Nevertheless, multi-class services are rarely considered in that framework since they make the formulated NUM become nonconvex and prevent its subgradient-based algorithm from converging. In this paper, we propose a scalable QoS rate allocation framework for OpenFlow in which multi-class services are considered. The convergence issue in the algorithm of our NUM-based framework is resolved by an admission control scheme. The network scalability is improved by our decentralized algorithms that can run on multiple parallel controllers. Extensive simulation and emulation results are provided to evaluate the performance of our method.