QoS-Aware Virtualization-Enabled Routing in Software-Defined Networks

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has been recognized as the next-generation networking paradigm. It is a fast-evolving technology that decouples the network control plane from the data forwarding plane. A logically centralized controller is responsible for all the control decisions and communication among the forwarding elements. However, current traffic engineering techniques and state-of-the-art routing algorithms do not effectively use the merits of SDNs, such as global centralized visibility, control and data plane decoupling, network management simplification and portability. In this paper, a multi-tenancy management framework is proposed to fulfill the quality-of-services (QoSs) requirements through tenant isolation, prioritization and flow allocation. First, a network virtualization algorithm is provided to isolate and prioritize tenants from different clients. Second, a novel routing scheme, called QoS-aware Virtualization-enabled Routing (QVR), is presented. It combines the proposed virtualization technique and a QoS-aware framework to enable flow allocation with respect to different tenant applications. Simulation results confirm that the proposed QVR algorithm surpasses the conventional algorithms with less traffic congestion and packet delay. This facilitates reliable and efficient data transportation in generalized SDNs. Therefore, it yields to service performance improvement for numerous applications and enhancement of client isolation.