The Top-K QoS-aware paths discovery for source routing in SDN

Abstract

Source routing is the routing scheme that arranges the whole path from source to target at the origin node that may suit the requirements from the upper layer applications' perspective. The centralized control in SDN (Software-Defined Networking) networks enables the awareness of the global topology at the controller. Therefore, augmented source routing schemes can be designed to achieve various purposes. This paper proposes a source routing scheme that conducts the top-K QoS-aware paths discovery in SDN. First, the novel non-invasive QoS over LLDP scheme is designed to collect QoS information based on LLDP in a piggyback fashion. Then, variations of the KSP (K Shortest Paths) algorithm are derived to find the unconstrained/constrained top-K ranked paths with regard to individual/overall path costs, reflecting the Quality of Service. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently collect the QoS information and find the top-K paths. Also, the performance of our scheme is applicable in QoS-sensitive application scenarios compared with previous works.