On QoS Support to Ofelia and OpenFlow

OpenFlow is the most promising architecture for future Software Defined Networks (SDNs). However, from the aspects of large-scale or carrier-grade networks, it still lacks some key components. For example, QoS (Quality of Service) provisioning is an indispensable part of such production networks. During the evolution of the OpenFlow standard, some QoS capabilities have been added to the protocol, however, even the latest version has only a limited and not well-defined QoS framework. Hence, integrated QoS support is missing in current OpenFlow experimental test beds including Ofelia. This paper describes a possible architectural extension to Ofelia in order to make it capable of running QoS related experiments. We summarize the initial tasks regarding the survey of QoS features and limitations of OpenFlow switches deployed in Ofelia islands and the performance tests needed to characterize these devices. For extending the feature palette of Ofelia, we propose a QoS management platform with full integration into the existing management framework. By means of this envisioned extension, QoS settings of the whole Ofelia test bed can be adjusted easily, in a user friendly fashion. Moreover, we walk through the main steps needed not only towards an integrated OpenFlow test bed with QoS support but towards a QoS architecture to OpenFlow.