Management of non-conformant traffic in OpenFlow environments

Nowadays many systems and applications require the identification of traffic classes, which must be compliant to specific pre-defined constraints. Traditional networking approaches are based on traffic shaping, which is used to force the traffic to comply to the service agreements. This task is usually demanded to the underlying devices and this choice causes limited flexibility since the network functionalities are strictly dependant on the specific hardware. In this paper we propose a solution based on SDN, which implements a software strategy to cope with non-conformant traffic flows inside a class-based system. This approach is therefore independent of the underlying hardware, as it is conceived to run as an algorithm inside the SDN controller. The proposed strategy will manage non-conformant flows, based on a set of statistic data gathered by a modified version of the Beacon controller, in order to limit the quality degradation of flows traversing the network.