Not Every Flow is Equal: SMART Discrimination in Redundancy

TL;DR

This paper introduces SMART, an SDN middlebox architecture that dynamically manages network flows in data centers by diverting and cloning packets to ensure reliable, differentiated QoS based on flow priority.

Contribution

SMART provides a novel SDN-based approach for adaptive flow routing and redundancy, improving QoS differentiation in data center networks.

Findings

SMART effectively diverts flows to less congested paths.

High-priority flows are cloned for redundancy.

The architecture enhances reliability and QoS differentiation.

Abstract

Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC) extend virtualization, software-defined networking and systems, and middleboxes to provide a better quality of service (QoS). While many network flow routing algorithms exist, most of them fail to adapt to the dynamic nature of the data center and cloud networks and their users' and enterprise requirements. This paper presents SMART, a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) middlebox architecture for reliable transfers. As an architectural enhancement for network flows allocation, routing, and control, SMART ensures timely delivery of flows by diverting them to a less congested path dynamically in the software-defined data center networks. SMART also clones packets of higher priority flows to route in an alternative path, along with the original flow. Hence SMART offers a differentiated QoS through varying levels of redundancy in the flows.