Authenticated Quality of Service Aware Routing in Software Defined Networks

Abstract

Quality of Service (QoS) aware routing is an ongoing and major problem for traditional networks since they are not able to manage network traffic for immense variety of users due to their inflexible and static architectures. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged to remove these limitations by separating the control plane and the data plane to provide centralized control with the help of programmable controllers. Such improvements also make SDN more flexible than traditional networks in terms of achieving QoS-aware routing for large and medium sized networks. However, providing QoS-aware routing in SDN without using any security mechanism may become a challenging issue. For instance, malicious users in the network may escalate their privileges to monopolize resource utilization. The provision of an authentication mechanism that jointly works with QoS-aware routing is expected to solve the issue. In this paper, we propose an Authenticated QoS-Aware Routing (AQoSAR) for Software Defined Networks to determine routing paths of a single user and a group of users in an authenticated manner. AQoSAR consists of the authentication application and the routing application. In the authentication application, we employ Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption since it easily operates with huge variety of users by defining attributes such as QoS-aware routing metrics. In the routing application, we propose a routing approach based on a metric list rather than a single metric for determining the QoS level of users. To show the applicability of AQoSAR, the security analysis and the performance analysis are presented.