Source Software Defined Networking Research Articles

Subscriber aware dynamic service function chaining

In this study, a novel subscriber aware dynamic service function chaining (SFC) framework is developed by using open source software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) solutions, where the aim is to provide service chaining per user traffic and to transform SGi-LAN services into virtual network functions. With this SFC framework, customer based dynamically applicable value added services can be provided without the need for manual operation that would require vast effort. In order to show the performance and scalability of the proposed framework, the solution is tested in a live telecom lab with varying number of subscribers and thread counts. The test results show that the proposed solution can successfully manage subscribers dynamically without packet loss for 2 million simultaneous subscribers’ traffic flows when the system is overloaded, regardless of hardware or vendor. In addition, it has been observed that the service chain rules can be applied in a very short period such as 2.9 s for 10,000 simultaneous subscriber SFC requests even in the loaded traffic flows, while the CPU consumption of virtual machines remained between 23.5% and 28.5%. These results have proved that the proposed solution can be used in large-scale telecom networks.

Timber: An SDN-Based Emulation Platform for Experimental Research on Video Streaming

In this paper, we present an open source Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based emulation platform called Timber . We aim to provide the research community with an experimental tool for the design and evaluation of the new Quality of Experience (QoE) management and monitoring procedures for video streaming. To this aim, the main functionalities of Timber include: i) an SDN application for taking QoE-aware management decisions; ii) an SDN controller to monitor the network’s QoS (Quality of Service) and implement network management actions, such as network slicing and Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) based prioritization operations; iii) a complete video streaming application including a multimedia server and a DASH-based client video player; iv) a user-end probe at the client video player to monitor QoE-related video application parameters, which are stored in a database that can be accessed by the SDN application; v) data analysis tools, which enable easy data visualization of measured QoS and QoE metrics as well as execution of statistical analysis of experimental results. In this article, we introduce and describe the main characteristics and functionalities of Timber as well as the implementation details. Finally, we provide experimental results of a video streaming scenario to demonstrate the capability of Timber to implement and test QoE-aware management approaches.