Optimal QoS-aware network reconfiguration in software defined cloud data centers

TL;DR

This paper presents an optimized SDN-based network reconfiguration method for cloud data centers that minimizes flow rerouting, reduces overhead, and improves QoS, packet loss, and delay performance.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical optimization model and a forwarding table compression technique for efficient, low-overhead network reconfiguration in SDN cloud data centers.

Findings

Significant reduction in reconfiguration overhead.

Improved QoS adherence during network changes.

Enhanced network stability and performance metrics.

Abstract

Software-defined networking (SDN) as a new paradigm for networking provides efficient resource reallocation platform in emerging cloud data center networks. The dynamic nature of cloud data center network's traffic, as well as the existence of big flows make it necessary to periodically reprogram the network through the SDN controller. Therefore, it is critical for network researchers to minimize the side-effects of network reconfiguration. In this way, the most challenging issue is the number of rerouted flows that affect the network stability and QoS parameters. As a result, dynamic reconfiguration of the network with minimum overhead (i.e. minimum flow rerouting) is an interesting problem in SDN-based resource reallocation. In this paper, we mathematically formulated the resource reallocation problem as an optimization problem with minimum network reconfiguration overhead subject to QoS requirements of the applications flows. In order to reduce the time complexity of solving the optimization problem, a forwarding table compression technique is devised making the proposed scheme an efficient resource reallocation method which can be used as an application on top of the SDN controller. Our Experimental results show that the proposed scheme decreases the network reconfiguration overhead dramatically while meeting the QoS constraints. Since the reconfiguration overhead of the proposed scheme is low, the controller can reallocate the resources more frequently based on the network condition. We also studied the impact of the proposed network reconfiguration scheme on packet loss and delay in the network. The results show that the proposed approach outperform the conventional methods.