A Traffic-Aware Controller Design for Next Generation Software Defined Networks

The tremendous increase in the mobile traffic requirements and the growing demands of large scale Cloud data centers have lead the network administrators to seek new management approaches. The Software Defined Networks (SDN) has raised as a promising solution providing more effective, programmable and granular configurations in order to isolate all the dynamic traffic requirements and spiky changes in the physical topological status of the networks from the network management. In this paper, we propose a novel SDN Controller which classifies the network traffic types according to the heterogeneous Quality of Service requirements that the network data is separated into the Constant Bit Rate (CBR) based real-time traffic and File Transfer Protocol (FTP) based non-real time traffic. Some crucial traffic flow parameters such as packet delivery ratio, routing overhead and delay are also considered in this classification. A novel protocol header is also generated by the proposed SDN controller in order to disseminate the necessary information through the L2/L3 switches in the Data Plane. This header is composed of the Parameter, Rule, Controller Action subfields. The proposed SDN controller decides the most effective network deployment strategy, i.e. either becoming an ad-hoc or being centralized, using the traffic types, network parameters and the header information. A detailed performance evaluation is provided which indicates the efficiency of the proposed SDN controller while deciding necessary deployment considering the heterogeneous traffic types as well as the increased number of users in the topology.