| For the multi-media based internet today, high quality real-time content delivery has is becoming a mainstream and the demand for Quality of Service (QoS) is greater than ever and is gaining significance since it has remained quiet an issue ever since internet has grown immensely over the past few years. Internet service providers have to load-balance their network during peak hours, and there is vast network load because of high definition multi-media streaming services like Netflix and YouTube. While technology and innovation has continued to evolve, network infrastructure system has stagnated and has remained almost same ever since its inception, the network devices such as routers, switches and hubs are considered black box devices with little or no abstraction, and information on how the data is routed within its ecosystem has been always a closely protected secret only with the device manufacturer. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm in computer networking that allows a logically centralized software program to control the behavior of an entire network. This is done by decoupling the network control logic from the fundamental physical routers and switches that forward traffic to the selected destination. One mechanism that allows the control plane to communicate with the data plane is OpenFlow. The network operators could write high-level control programs that specify the behavior of an entire network. The centralized control makes it possible to define more specific and complex tasks that could involve many network functionalities, e.g., security, resource management and control, into a single framework. The explosive growth of real time applications and high definition media content that require rigid Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, brings the network programmers to design network protocols that deliver certain performance. This thesis exploits the use of SDN combining with OpenFlow to manage network services with a high QoS demand. SDN architecture can save companies and service providers money, reduce provisioning time from weeks to minutes, provide centralized management, promote innovation, and allow programmability. This paper demonstrates a QoS management and orchestration architecture that allows us to manage the network in a modular way. Then, by implementing an application layer QoS protocol using OpenFlow protocol, we detect application layer traffic of Torrent and YouTube sessions respectively and provision QoS parameters on it. This paper discusses the implementation details and provides a performance analysis. |
