SDN-Based Architecture for Providing QoS to High Performance Distributed Applications

The specification of quality of service (QoS) requirements in traditional networks is limited by the high administrative cost of these environments. Nevertheless, newer network paradigms, as software-defined networks (SDNs), simplify and relaxes the management of networks. In this sense, SDN can provide a simple/effective way to develop QoS provisioning. In this paper, we propose a QoS provision architecture exploiting the capabilities of SDN. Our approach allows the specification of classes of service and also negotiates the QoS requirements between applications and the SDN network controller. The SDN controller, in turn, monitors the network and adjusts its performance through resource reservation and traffic prioritization. We developed a proof-of-concept of our proposal and, our experimental results show that the additional routines present low overhead, whereas -for a given test application- we observe a reduction of up to 47% in transfer times.