With the advancement in the requirement of data, the need for stringent quality of service guarantee is a demand of the current world, which brings the network programmers to design the network protocols that certify certain guaranteed performance in terms of service delivery. Here, focus is on the quality of service within the SDN network with its comparison and implementation using simulation. Types of quality of service are also discussed in this chapter with a focus on the ways of implementation of quality of service. The authors define a QoS management and orchestration architecture that allow them to manage the network in a modular manner. Performing the operation and results in such a network is shown as are the outputs for the same.
TopIntroduction
Software defined network changes the networking in terms of type of configuration and managing the networks. SDN provides the abstraction of underlying network with the application reside in the upper layer. SDN provides an innovative approach to decouple the logic of control plane and data plane. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a latest technology that is dynamic, manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable, making it ideal for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today’s applications (Kannan Govindarajan, Kong Chee Meng, Hong Ong,(2013); Kim H., Feamster N., (2013)). SDN architecture decouples the control plane and data plane functions enabling the control plane to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for applications and network services (Akram Hakiria, Aniruddha Gokhalec, Pascal Berthoua, Douglas C. Schmidt, (2014); Kind M., Westphal F., Gladisch A., Topp S.,(2012)). The Open Flow protocol is a foundational element for building SDN solutions. The SDN architecture is:
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Directly Programmable: Control plane is directly programmable because it is decoupled from data plane (forwarding functions).
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Agile: Abstracting control from forwarding lets administrators dynamically adjust network-wide traffic flow to meet changing needs.
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Centrally managed
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Open standards-based and vendor-neutral
This means SDN control software sits at top of physical infrastructure layer composed of networking devices, with which it communicates via a control plane interface such as Open Flow (Kanaumi Y., Saito S., Kawai E., Ishii S., Kobayashi K., Shimojo S. (2013)). The idea is to turn networks into flexible, programmable platforms to optimize resource utilization, making them more cost effective and scalable. By providing APIs for business applications and services, SDN also promises to recast information technology by integrating cloud-based services and capabilities, and high-speed networking, into the computing fabric.
TopSdn Operation
The SDN devices contain forwarding functionality for deciding what to do with each incoming packet. The devices also contain the data that drives those forwarding decisions. The data itself is actually represented by the flows defined by the controller, as depicted in the upper-left portion of each device. A flow describes a set of packets transferred from one network endpoint (or set of endpoints) to another endpoint (or set of endpoints). These endpoints may be defined as IP address-TCP/UDP port pairs, VLAN endpoints, layer three tunnel endpoints, and input ports, among other things. One set of rules describes the forwarding actions that the device should take for all packets belonging to that flow.
It can be understood from Figure 2 that flow is unidirectional, packets flowing between the same two endpoints in the opposite direction could each constitute a separate flow. Flows are represented on a device as a flow entry.