OpenFlow based flow level bandwidth provisioning for CICQ switches

Flow level bandwidth provisioning offers fine granularity bandwidth assurance for individual flows. It is especially important for virtual network based experiment environments, to isolate traffic of different experiments or different types, which may be fed to the same switch or router port. Existing flow level bandwidth provisioning solutions suffer from a number of drawbacks, including high implementation complexity, poor performance guarantees, and inefficiency to process variable length packets. In this paper, we study flow level bandwidth provisioning for combined-input-crosspoint-queued switches in the OpenFlow context. We propose the FEBR (Flow lEvel Bandwidth pRovisioning) algorithm, which reduces the switch scheduling problem to multiple instances of fair queueing problems, each employing a well studied fair queueing algorithm. FEBR can tightly emulate the ideal Generalized Processing Sharing model, and accurately guarantee the provisioned bandwidth. Further, we implement FEBR in the OpenFlow version 1.0 software switch. In conjunction with the capability of OpenFlow to flexibly define and manipulate flows, we thus provide a practical flow level bandwidth provisioning solution. Finally, we present extensive simulation and experiment data to validate the analytical results and evaluate our design.