Adaptive routing and priority ordering for software-defined real-time networking

Abstract

This work constitutes the first attempt towards an adaptive real-time communication system that leverages the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to provide end-to-end deadlines guarantees. SDN is an emerging networking paradigm that allows to control the network through directly programmable software controllers, offering the flexibility to manage and optimize network resources dynamically. In this paper, we address the problem of determining routes and flow priorities to support real-time communication on SDN-enabled networks. We present a scalable routing algorithm that adaptively reconfigures the routes of existing flows in order to find bandwidth-guaranteed routes for all the flows. We also introduce an optimal priority assignment scheme, based on the well-known OPA algorithm, with respect to end-to-end delay analysis in multi-hop communication environments. In addition, we employ a feedback loop between routing and priority ordering schemes. We implement a prototype of the proposed system, called \sys, as an SDN controller and deploy it on a testbed network of 30 BeagleBone devices. Our experiments show that \sys can be deployed in real-world commodity networks to provide end-to-end deadline guarantees, while the proposed schemes collectively improve schedulability significantly.