Real Time Monitoring of Packet Loss in Software Defined Networks

Abstract

In order to meet QoS demands from customers, currently, ISPs over-provision capacity. Networks need to continuously monitor performance metrics, such as bandwidth, packet loss etc., in order to quickly adapt forwarding rules in response to changes in the workload. The packet loss metric is also required by network administrators and ISPs to identify clusters in network that are vulnerable to congestion. However, the existing solutions either require special instrumentation of the network or impose significant measurement overhead.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN), an emerging paradigm in networking advocates separation of the data plane and the control plane, separating the network’s control logic from the underlying routers and switches, leaving a logically centralized software program to control the behavior of the entire network, and introducing network programmability. Further, OpenFlow allows to implement fine-grained Traffic Engineering (TE) and provides flexibility to determine and enforce end-to-end QoS parameters.