Application-aware traffic engineering in software-defined network

Abstract

Software-defined Networking (SDN) is a network paradigm to resolve the challenges of traditional networks. SDN can utilize its concept of control and data plane separation to improve Quality of Service (QoS) of certain network traffic efficiently. Because traffic engineering in SDN is a promising way to satisfy the requirement well, we propose an application-aware traffic engineering system that cooperates with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). In the system, port number and DPI-based traffic classification are used to identify application or service flows. The system improves QoS of the identified flows by distributing them to multiple queues with different priorities in each switch port. A network admin can define a mapping table between an identified flow and its QoS priority (queue) in the system. To demonstrate the feasibility of the system, we designed and implemented the system by constructing an SDN controller application and data plane entities. The results of the experiment shows increased throughput and reduced packet delay for identified application traffic.