Tuneman: Customizing Networks to Guarantee Application Bandwidth and Latency

Abstract

We examine how to provide applications with dedicated bandwidth and guaranteed latency in a programmable mission-critical network. Unlike other SDN approaches such as B4 or SWAN, our system Tuneman optimizes both routes and packet schedules at each node to provide flows with sub-second bandwidth changes. Tuneman uses node-level optimization to compute node schedules in a slotted switch and does dynamic routing using a search procedure with Quality of Service– (QoS) based weights. This allows Tuneman to provide an efficient solution for mission-critical networks that have stringent QoS requirements. We evaluate Tuneman on a telesurgery network using a switch prototype built using FPGAs and also via simulations on India’s Tata Network. For mission-critical networks with multiple QoS levels, Tuneman has comparable or better utilization than SWAN while providing delay bounds guarantees.