ProgLab: Programmable labels for QoS provisioning on software defined networks

Abstract

To ensure the quality of service of an end-to-end connection, current network solutions are mostly dependable on the differentiation between different classes of traffic. The Software-defined networking (SDN) architecture has emerged to offer network programmability, giving to network operators a programmatic control over their network. In SDN, network devices are programmed in many ways, having a standard, open, and vendor-agnostic interface, e.g., OpenFlow, enabling the control plane to instruct the forwarding behavior of network devices from different vendors. In this paper, we introduce the Programmable Labels (ProgLab) approach to support traffic differentiation with QoS guarantees as a low-cost alternative built over an SDN architecture. The idea relies on the simplification of a packet-forwarding operation which relies on the remainder of a division, instead of classical table lookup method. ProgLab computes programmable label at the control plane by solving a congruence system from Residue Number System and the co-prime numbers assigned to the switches in the path of an end-to-end connection. Such label has a meaning within this network that expresses the entire route, addressing the respective traffic class at each switch’s logical queue along the path. ProgLab approach has been implemented through the P4 language and evaluated through an emulation-based evaluation. The experiments demonstrated the feasibility of ProgLab and showed its ability in providing QoS differentiation on demand.