P4SQA: A P4 Switch-Based QoS Assurance Mechanism for SDN

Abstract

Data center networks include a wide variety of service categories, which leads to a complex network topology. As a result, the QoS of different service flows cannot be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose a QoS assurance mechanism based on P4 switches (P4SQA) to make full use of network resources. P4SQA includes two functions: in-network traffic classification and in-network queue management. To reduce the communication overhead and computational pressure on the Software Defined Network (SDN) controller, we offload part of the neural computation from the control plane to the data plane. A fully connected neural network-based traffic classification method is deployed in the programmable data plane to classify different traffic types. In addition, the optimized active queue management algorithm CoDeL is integrated into the P4 switch (PCoDeL) to prevent network congestion while guaranteeing QoS more effectively. The evaluation results show that traffic classification accuracy has improved, especially in terms of the F1_score, which reached 0.97, significantly better than other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, compared to traditional queue management algorithms, PCoDeL can improve network throughput and reduce transmission delay, which verifies the effectiveness and superiority of P4SQA in ensuring QoS.