Network traffic control for multi-homed end-hosts via SDN

Anees Al-Najjar, Furqan Hameed Khan, Marius Portmann
2020 IET Communications  
Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging technology of efficiently controlling and managing computer networks, such as in data centres, wide-area networks, as well as in ubiquitous communication. In this study, the authors explore the idea of embedding the SDN components, represented by SDN controller and virtual switch, in end-hosts to improve network performance. In particular, the authors consider load balancing across multiple network interfaces on end-hosts with different link
more » ... ity scenarios. The authors have explored and implemented different SDN-based load-balancing approaches based on OpenFlow software switches, and have demonstrated the feasibility and the potential of this approach. The proposed system has been evaluated with MultiPath transmission control protocol (MPTCP). The proposed results demonstrated the potential of applying the SDN concepts on multi-homed devices resulting in an increase in achieved throughput of 55% compared to the legacy single network approach and 10% compared to the MPTCP. 1. Be efficient, and not introduce a significant amount of overhead on the host. 2. Be transparent to both the applications as well as the rest of the network. Neither the applications nor the protocol stack of any other nodes in the network should have to be modified. 3. Avoid packet reordering, and the associated detrimental impact on transmission control protocol (TCP) performance. 4. Work with any OpenFlow compliant software switch and controller, from version 1.3 onwards. Moreover, although most earlier research efforts on SDN-based network evaluations [8] use Mininet. Nonetheless, the Mininet network emulator has issues such as, it mainly supports wired network topologies, it does not offer greater network scalability and uses a shard Linux kernel space for all virtual hosts [9] . The latter greatly impacts the design of the proposed system and has a separate control on the SDN-based end-host from other network elements. Therefore, it is necessary to either enhance Mininet capability or use other evaluation tools that provide greater flexibility in one or the other domain. For this reason, a compatible network emulation testbed, graphical network simulation (GNS3) [10], has been used in this work where the network elements are Fig. 1 SDN architecture
doi:10.1049/iet-com.2020.0335 fatcat:va4kokjxhzgijk7owfs2nguhlm