Multipath Transmission Mechanism with P4 Switches in Software Defined Networks

P4+NFV: Optimal offloading from P4 switches to NFV for diverse traffic streams

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are transforming Data Center (DC), Telecom, and enterprise networking. The programmability offered by P4 enables SDN to be more protocol-independent and flexible. Data Centers are increasingly adopting SmartNICs (sNICs) to accelerate packet processing that can be leveraged to support packet processing pipelines and custom Network Functions (NFs). However, there are several challenges in integrating and deploying P4 based SDN control as well as host and sNIC-based programmable NFs. These include configuration and management of the data plane components (Host and sNIC P4 switches) for the SDN control plane and effective utilization of data plane resources. P4NFV addresses these concerns and provides a unified P4 switch abstraction framework to simplify the SDN control plane, reducing management complexities, and leveraging a host-local SDN Agent to improve the overall resource utilization. The SDN agent considers the network-wide, host, and sNIC specific capabilities and constraints. Based on workload and traffic characteristics, P4NFV determines the partitioning of the P4 tables and optimal placement of NFs (P4 actions) to minimize the overall delay and maximize resource utilization. P4NFV uses Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) based optimization formulation and achieves up to 2. 5X increase in system capacity while minimizing the delay experienced by flows. P4NFV considers the number of packet exchanges, flow size, and state dependency to minimize the delay imposed by data transmission over PCI Express interface.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) was introduced with a philosophy of decoupling the control plane from the data plane which facilitates network management while ensuring programmability in order to improve performance and monitoring. OpenFlow which enabled SDN was first introduced to match twelve header fields whilst at current it matches forty one which is expected to grow exponentially. Therefore future networks must have the ability to flexibly parse packets through a common interface. Programming Protocol independent Packet Processing (P4) was introduced to achieve the aforementioned by programming the underlying switch, providing instructions and utilizing APIs to populate the forwarding tables. A P4 programmed switch will forward packets through a parser into multiple stages of match+action tables to find the destination node which is considered the most efficient mechanism for routing. This paper takes into the account the latest platform developed for service providers, Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) to deploy two environments configured in the aforementioned technologies in order to test their performance. Four case studies were drawn which were simulated in Mininet which incorporated SDN + P4 switches. A significant increase of performances were recorded when compared with the performance of cases using SDN only.

Data center networks include a wide variety of service categories, which leads to a complex network topology. As a result, the QoS of different service flows cannot be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose a QoS assurance mechanism based on P4 switches (P4SQA) to make full use of network resources. P4SQA includes two functions: in-network traffic classification and in-network queue management. To reduce the communication overhead and computational pressure on the Software Defined Network (SDN) controller, we offload part of the neural computation from the control plane to the data plane. A fully connected neural network-based traffic classification method is deployed in the programmable data plane to classify different traffic types. In addition, the optimized active queue management algorithm CoDeL is integrated into the P4 switch (PCoDeL) to prevent network congestion while guaranteeing QoS more effectively. The evaluation results show that traffic classification accuracy has improved, especially in terms of the F1_score, which reached 0.97, significantly better than other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, compared to traditional queue management algorithms, PCoDeL can improve network throughput and reduce transmission delay, which verifies the effectiveness and superiority of P4SQA in ensuring QoS.

When the use of wireless sensors network is becoming increasingly wider and deeper, its problems are also beginning to highlight. Due to the limit of wireless sensors' energy supply and the unstable channel, ensuring the reliability and speed of the transmission has become the research hot spot. With multipath or retransmission transmission mechanism, the redundancy of data transmission can be ensured to a certain extent, improving the reliability of the process. A new mechanism is put forward in which multipath transmission is a priority and the retransmission is a secondary consideration. While considering about the multipath transmission, a method is used to decide a best plan within a short time taking changing dynamic and comprehensive situations such as the energy consumption, the pressure of the network, the congestion condition into consideration. The next-hop nodes are chosen based on woken value which is calculated by basic value and fluctuating value. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can provides transmission at a faster rate, reduce the network energy consumption as well as make a balance of each node' load.

The Virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE) technology has recently emerged to reduce telecom operators' OPEX and CAPEX. It evolved from Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies. This paper proposes a flexible vCPE framework to enable dynamic chaining of Virtual Network Functions (VNF) by using Programmable Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) switches. It can obtain a much better packet processing performance compared to the pure software vCPE solution. The OpenFlow switch provides similar hardware acceleration, but it executes the flow tables in a fixed order, and it is not possible to skip the flow tables, which are not subscribed to by a customer. However, P4, the domain-specific language used to describe how to process packets on a data plane (DP), gives more flexibility than the OpenFlow. It provides a way to avoid the fixed flow table execution order and can introduce a new service on the fly. Our flexible vCPE framework can be achieved by the synergies between an NFV controller on the cloud and a P4 switch at the edge. In this paper, an Open Network Operating System (ONOS) controller with P4Runtime is used as a VNF control plane and a P4 Behavioral Model (BMv2) software switch is used as a DP. Finally, dynamic function chaining is realized using three possible implementations, viz. multi-instance, clone, and resubmit. P4 language is used for the implementations. Experimental results show that a multi-instance based solution is better than a resubmit and clone.

This article addresses the joint switch and controller placement problem in a hybrid software-defined network (SDN), which is an intermediate step of transforming a traditional backbone network into a pure SDN. For a hybrid SDN, the quality of service (QoS) is a primary concern for ensuring service guarantee of a traditional network, while providing additional benefits of softwarization. In the SDN, the positions of SDN controllers determine the QoS parameters, such as network throughput and flow processing delays. Many existing solutions determine the controller locations to optimize the latency of network links and control plane load. However, there is a need to address the problem considering additional aspects of the hybrid SDN, such as SDN switch placement and incremental upgrades. In this article, we propose a priority-based SDN switch placement approach and an incremental controller placement approach for the hybrid SDN. Simulation results depict that the proposed scheme increases programmable traffic by 9.90% compared to the existing MapFirst scheme when the switch upgrade budget is <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\$}$</tex-math></inline-formula> 400 K. The proposed scheme decreases QoS violation by 20.89% compared to the Greedy approach with 0.3 million flows.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new network design which brings certain advantageous to the network management compared to the Traditional Network. This research study implements best effort based traditional network. The ability of SDN to support better allocation of bandwidth makes it possible to apply the SDN concept in this research study in order to manage the usage of limited bandwidth in the network. Available network bandwidth must be managed efficiently to ensure a stable network throughput to be delivered to the end user. In SDN, the bandwidth can be managed by utilizing per-port output queues and bandwidth reservation according to the needs of the traffic. This research study assumes the traffics in the network are classified into Sensitive Traffics and Non-Sensitive Traffics. The purpose of this research study is to propose a new model. The model implemented the SDN concept to replace the Traditional Network concept in order to simplify the network bandwidth management while giving priority to the Sensitive Traffics to access the network throughput. The performance of the network throughput of the proposed model with the Traditional Network also has been compared. Preliminary results show the sensitive traffics successfully achieved a higher throughput compared with the non-sensitive traffic.

Software-defined networks (SDNs) are expanding their presence beyond laboratories, campus networks, ISPs, and data centre networks, moving into various domains. Although originally designed for campus networks, SDNs face scalability challenges, especially with the use of OpenFlow. Addressing these challenges requires innovative traffic management mechanisms to efficiently handle the growing number of connected devices and the increasing volume of traffic from various types of applications. This article proposes an innovative method for link weight selection that incorporates multipath transmission and flow aggregation in the SDNs. This novel approach improves resource utilization in two key ways. First, it involves the preservation of bandwidth during congestion. Second, it minimizes internal resource usage, as illustrated by a reduction in the number of table entries in switches. Resources undergo optimization through the introduction of a novel mechanism for flow aggregation. This novel mechanism, coupled with multipath transmission, enables adaptive responses to dynamic changes in network conditions. The aggregation process leads to a reduced number of flow entries in the core switches compared to the conventional operation of OpenFlow. The proposed scenarios for link weight allocation allow for a reduction in the number of entries in the core switches by up to 99%. The application of the proposed method also results in an increase of 58% in traffic transmission.

IP video surveillance (IPVS) systems, unlike traditional analog-based systems, are capable of operating over pre-existing computer networks. As a consequence, resource contention among the video streams from multiple IP cameras and traffic from other applications can significantly degrade the overall performance of the underlying network. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a relatively new paradigm which aims to build programmable and flexible networks. By separating forwarding and control functions, the centralized SDN controller can create a map of the network topology by relying on the information provided by the switches. This paper proposes an SDN-based framework to enhance the performance of IPVS systems deployed over underprovisioned networks. In order to assist the controller's rerouting and bitrate adjustment decisions, a video quality indicator was also formulated by using the FlowStats messages queried from the switches via OpenFlow, a widely recognized protocol in SDN. Moreover, our framework is designed based on the observation that the video streams in surveillance systems offer varying utilities depending on the captured event. Experimental results show that employing the proposed solution reduced the video streams' average packet loss, latency and jitter by 87%, 11%, 7%, respectively and also increased throughput by 8%. Furthermore, the comparison of the video streams' QoS metrics suggests that the proposed solution can prioritize the reception of selected streams.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a network approach achieved by decoupling of the control and data planes. The control plane is logically centralized and the data plane is distributed across the network elements. The real-time network is in need of the incorporation of distributed controllers to maintain distributed state information of the traffic flows. Software-based solutions aid distributed SDN controllers to handle fluctuating network traffic and the controller’s configurations are dynamically programmed in real time. In this study, SDN controllers were programmed with a stateful firewall application to provide firewall functionalities without the support of committed hardware. A stateful firewall filtered traffic based on the complete context of incoming packets; it continuously evaluated the entire context of traffic flows, looking for network entry rather than specific traffic flows. In addition, a flow-based scheduling module was implemented in the distributed controllers to improve network scalability. A network cluster was configured with three distributed controllers and we experimented with three independent network topologies. The performance of the proposed network model was evaluated by measuring and analyzing metrics such as network throughput (kbps), delay (ms) and network overhead (pkt/ms) for various combinations of controllers and topologies. The results of the analysis were determined using the mininet emulator. The findings of the performance evaluation indicate that the distributed SDN controllers performs better than a centralized controller. When comparing distributed SDN with two controllers and distributed SDN with three controllers the overall network throughput is increased by 64%, the delay is decreased by 43% and network overhead is reduced by 39%.

In today's ever-evolving networking landscape, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as a paradigm-shifting technology that promises greater flexibility, agility, and control over network infrastructures. However, how easy are the configuration, extensibility, and programmability of these SDN controllers, considering the practical implications for network administrators and developers? Despite the growing adoption of SDN, there is limited research on the comparative performance of controllers across multiple simulation environments. This study aims to explore the practical implementation and comparative evaluation of different SDN Controllers within diverse simulated network environments. Prominent controllers such as POX and Faucet are meticulously configured and deployed in simulated network environments created using GNS3 (Graphical Network Simulator-3), OPNET (Optimized Network Engineering Tools), NS3 (Network Simulator-3), OMNET++ (Objective Modular Network Testbed in C++) and MININET platforms. Furthermore. the study employs a range of performance metrics like controller latency, network throughput, packet loss, CPU (Central Processing Unit) and memory utilization to assess the efficacy and efficiency of each SDN Controller. The Results indicated that Mininet provided the lowest latency, whereas OPNET demonstrated better scalability for large-scale networks. NS3, though useful for SDN network design and visualization, exhibited higher CPU and memory utilization that might limit its scalability for large-scale SDN controller simulations. While GNS3 offered a balanced performance and resource utilization, making it a suitable choice for SDN controller simulation that prioritizes realistic network modelling, OMNET++, on the other hand, exhibited moderate performance metrics with efficient resource utilization, making it suitable for SDN controller simulations requiring a balance between performance...

BIM2RT: BWAS-immune mechanism based multipath reliable transmission with fault tolerance in wireless sensor networks

Advantages of Software Defined Networks (SDN) technology, which decouples control and transmission planesof computer networks, provides the infrastructure that can help to improve the system performance of video streaming applications, one of today's popular Internet applications. The SDN controller may assist the clients by using the network statistics while determining the routes of the appropriate streaming paths in the physical network. In this study, a layered video streaming architecture is proposed, in which SDN controller recommends a server, video codec, and the optimal number of video layers to clients, with taking into account the server load and network status. Performance of the proposed system is given comparatively and it has been shown that the system parameters considered can help to improve the video streaming system performance.

Computer networks are the fundamental infrastructure of intelligent environments (IEs). Software defined network (SDN) is an emerging software-based network architecture that separates the control plane from data plane to facilitate dynamic network management and configuration; two important parameters which are essential in real-time IEs. This separation alleviates network administrators to implement efficient fault tolerance strategies and increasing reliability and quality of service (QoS). Hence, they can make their networks more reliable and as a result, decrease the adverse effects due to network failures. As a result, SDN is a candidate for using in new IEs such as internet of things (IoT). The control plane of SDN can be deployed on the IoT cloud server to manage the entire network. Link failure is one of the most common and critical failures in such computer networks which causes dropping of data packets and reduces network performance considerably. A survivable traffic engineering (TE) method can provide protection against link failures and heighten the reliability of data transmission. To this purpose, this paper proposes an efficient and survivable software-based TE model over SDN called EFSUTE to increase reliability in real-time IEs. EFSUTE leverages the capabilities of SDN to compute and install two disjoint paths between any source–destination pair in the network. EFSUTE models network routing as a Shared Risk Link Group problem which provides topological diversity. This policy increases the survivability by providing alternative paths between network hosts. To prove the effectiveness of EFSUTE, we conducted extensive simulations and compared it with restoration techniques. Experimental results confirm that EFSUTE can be practically used in SDN and efficiently protects the network traffics against link failures to increase safety and provides a reliable software based infrastructure with QoS for real-time IEs.