Scalable Application-Aware Resource Management in Software Defined Networking

SDN architecture based on separation of control and data plane in network devices enables realization of network programmability and application-aware networking. In this paper, we point out that the information of how applications are using network resources is ignored in modern SDN solution and should be recorded in application-aware SDN. We stress the importance of mapping applications to network resources and maintaining such mapping in the resource management of the SDN controller. The mechanism of mapping and the corresponding implementation are proposed. We setup a testbed to compare performance between scenarios with and without such mapping, which turns out that the mapping between network resources and applications can bring huge performance improvement.