Applying software-defined networking to minimize the end-to-end delay of network services

Abstract

There is a grand challenge to transfer the gigantic volume of data generated from a variety of smart cities applications. It is an urgent need to efficiently and effectively transmit such time-sensitive data in a wide-area communication. In this paper, we propose an approach by leveraging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to develop a communication solution for data transfers in smart city applications. Our approach is Quality of Service (QoS)-aware that minimizes the end-to-end delay for data transmission in an SDN infrastructure by using a Timestamp Recording method to compare the arrival and departure of flows and packets over a period. Finally, we evaluate our solution on the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), a real-world federated testbed. We first compare the Timestamp Recording to other common delay measurement techniques. Our analysis demonstrates its effectiveness at scale. Additionally, we carefully examine the accuracy and efficiency in minimizing end-to-end delay delivered by our SDN solution with contrast to a non-optimized SDN environment. Our experiments demonstrate the proposed solution effective and efficient in delivering data with an optimal delay. Particularly, our solution reduces about 22% in end-to-end-delay compared to a non-optimized SDN environment.