End-to-End Service Delivery with QoS Guarantee in Software-Defined Networks

Abstract

Software-Defined Network (SDN) is expected to have a significant impact on future networking. Although exciting progress has been made toward realizing SDN, application of this new networking paradigm in the future Internet to support end-to-end QoS provisioning faces some new challenges. The autonomous network domains coexisting in the Internet and the diverse user applications deployed upon the Internet call for a uniform Service Delivery Platform (SDP) that enables high-level network abstraction and inter-domain collaboration for end-to-end service provisioning. However, the currently available SDN technologies lack effective mechanisms for supporting such a platform. In this paper, we first present a SDP framework that applies the Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) principle to provide network abstraction and orchestration for end-to-end service provisioning in SDN-based future Internet. Then we focus our study on two enabling technologies for such a SDP to achieve QoS guarantee; namely a network abstraction model and an end-to-end resource allocation scheme. Specifically we propose a general model for abstracting the service capabilities offered by network domains and develop a technique for determining the required amounts of bandwidth in network domains for end-to-end service delivery with QoS guarantee. Both the analytical and numerical results obtained in this paper indicate that the NaaS-based SDP not only simplifies SDN service and resource management but also enhances bandwidth utilization for end-to-end QoS provisioning.