Scalable Bandwidth Management in Software-Defined Networks

There has been a growing demand to manage bandwidth as the network traffic increases. Network applications such as real time video streaming, voice over IP and video conferencing in IP networks has risen rapidly over the recently and is projected to continue in the future. These applications consume a lot of bandwidth resulting in increasing pressure on the networks. In dealing with such challenges, modern networks must be designed to be application sensitive and be able to offer Quality of Service (QoS) based on application requirements. Network paradigms such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) allows for direct network programmability to change the network behavior to suit the application needs in order to provide solutions to the challenge. In this dissertation, the objective is to research if SDN can provide scalable QoS requirements to a set of dynamic traffic flows. Methods are implemented to attain scalable bandwidth management to provide high QoS with SDN. Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) values and DSCP remarking with Meters are used to implement high QoS requirements such that bandwidth guarantee is provided to a selected set of traffic flows. The theoretical methodology is implemented for achieving QoS, experiments are conducted to validate and illustrate that QoS can be implemented in SDN, but it is unable to implement High QoS due to the lack of implementation for Meters with DSCP remarking. The research work presented in this dissertation aims at the identification and addressing the critical aspects related to the SDN based QoS provisioning using flow aggregation techniques. Several tests and demonstrations will be conducted by utilizing virtualization methods. The tests are aimed at supporting the proposed ideas and aims at creating an improved understanding of the practical SDN use cases and the challenges that emerge in virtualized environments. DiffServ Assured Forwarding is chosen as a QoS architecture for implementation. The bandwidth management scalability in SDN is proved based on throughput analysis by considering two conditions i.e 1) Per-flow QoS operation and 2) QoS by using DiffServ operation in the SDN environment with Ryu controller. The result shows that better performance QoS and bandwidth management is achieved using the QoS by DiffServ operation in SDN rather than the per-flow QoS operation