Jointly optimized QoS-aware virtualization and routing in software defined networks

Software Defined Networks (SDNs) have been recognized as the next-generation networking paradigm 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 switches. 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 great computation capability. In this paper, a multi-tenancy management framework is proposed to enable the jointly optimized design of quality-of-services (QoSs)-aware virtualization and routing by tenant isolation and prioritization as well as flow allocation, fulfilling QoS requirements of tenants’ applications. Specifically, a fine-grained network virtualization is first proposed to isolate and prioritize tenants through the design of network and switch hypervisors. Furthermore, a QoS-aware dynamic flow allocation is proposed to enable optimal flow routes selection upon the given network slicing with QoS provisioning. Finally, an adaptive feedback management tool, called QoS-aware Virtualization-enabled Routing (QVR), is proposed to combine virtualization with flow allocation and supports reliable and efficient transmissions with regards of time-varying QoS requirements, network topologies, and traffic statistics. Simulations confirm that QVR achieves much less shared edges, congestion latency, and traffic delay for multiple tenants, thus facilitating virtualization-enabled traffic engineering for multi-tenancy SDNs. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.