Automated and scalable QoS control for network convergence

Abstract

Network convergence is becoming increasingly important for cost reduction and management simplification. However, this convergence requires strict performance isolation while keeping fine-grained control of each service (e.g. VoIP, video conference etc.). It is difficult to guarantee the performance requirements for various services with manual configuration of the Quality-of-Service (QoS) knobs on a per-device basis as is prevalent today. We propose a network QoS control framework for converged fabrics that automatically and flexibly programs a network of devices with the necessary QoS parameters, derived from a high level set of application requirements. The controller leverages our QoS extensions of OpenFlow APIs, including per-flow rate-limiters and dynamic priority assignment. We also present some results from a testbed implementation to validate the performance of our controller. 1