APIs for QoS configuration in Software Defined Networks

The OpenFlow (OF) protocol is widely used in Software Defined Networking (SDN) to realize the communication between the controller and forwarding devices. OF allows great flexibility in managing traffic flows. However, OF alone is not enough to build more complex SDN services that require complete control and management of the data plane (e.g. configurations of ports, queues, etc.). The current work contributes to the SDN ecosystem with the implementation of a plugin for the OVSDB protocol, for an existing SDN controller (SDNC). OVSDB complements OF with management functionality such as configuration of devices, ports, queues, etc. An Application Programming Interface (API) for dynamic configuration of QoS resources in the network devices is implemented herein, by using the capabilities of OVSDB. Further, the paper demonstrates the possibility to create network services with coarse granularity on top of the fine granular services exposed by the QoS configuration API at the SDNC. A series of tests emphasize the capabilities and the performance of the implemented QoS configuration API.