Control of multiple packet schedulers for improving QoS on OpenFlow/SDN networking

Abstract: Packet scheduling is essential to properly support applications on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) model. However, on OpenFlow/SDN, QoS is only performed with bandwidth guarantees and by a well-known FIFO scheduling. Facing this limitation, this paper presents the QoSFlow proposal, which controls multiple packet schedulers of Linux kernel and improve the flexibility of QoS control. The paper assesses QoSFlow performance, by analysing response time of packet scheduler operations running on datapath level, maximum bandwidth capacity, hardware resource utilization rate, bandwidth isolation and QoE. Our outcomes show an increase more than 48% on PSNR value of QoE by using SFQ scheduling.