QoS mechanism for virtualized wireless networks with software-defined networking

Summary An effective Quality‐of‐Service (QoS) mechanism is essential for high‐quality Internet services. One QoS solution, rate limiting, is now a common strategy for obtaining a desired QoS from end‐to‐end traffic flow. Because of the high sensitivity of the QoS metric, implementing rate‐limiting QoS in hardware obtains better accuracy compared with evaluation by simulation models. For virtualized wired‐wireless networks, this study proposes a software‐defined networking based QoS mechanism based on OpenFlow‐enabled Net Field Programmable Gate Array platform. The OpenFlow wildcard table module in the user data path is modified to budget each packet with a certain buffer speed when the packets pass the output queues. The modified OpenFlow network isolates traffic flow and limits the traffic rate according to the budgeted bandwidth. The experimental results show that the mechanism achieves 4.6% improvement in packet loss and 47% improvement in delay. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. A QoS strategy, rate limiting, was proposed for solving the bandwidth occupation problem in wired‐wireless data network, which to obtain a desired QoS from end‐to‐end traffic flow. A software‐defined networking based QoS mechanism, which based on OpenFlow‐enabled NetFPGA platform was modified to support the rate limiting function for wired‐wireless networks with the characteristic of high reconfigurable, scalability and virtualization. The experimental results show that the mechanism achieves 4.6% improvement in packet loss and 47% improvement in delay.