DiffPerf: Towards Performance Differentiation and Optimization with SDN Implementation
Published in IEEE TNSM (under review), 2021
Recommended citation: Walid Aljoby, Xin Wang, Dinil Divakaran, Tom Fu, Richard Ma. "DiffPerf:Towards Performance Differentiation and Optimization with SDN Implementation". IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management (IEEE TNSM), "under review"
Abstract:
Continuing the current trend, Internet traffic is expected to grow significantly over the coming years, with video traffic consuming the biggest share. On the one hand, this growth poses challenges to access providers, who have to upgrade their infrastructure to meet the growing traffic demands as well as find new ways to monetize their network resources. On the other hand, despite numerous optimizations of the transport congestion control, and the switch buffer sizing and management algorithms; however, the complex interaction among all of them still leads to uncertain user performance and thus degrades user-perceived quality, under various network and traffic conditions. The culprit is the difficulty to dynamically control the amount of bandwidth allocated to each of the competing flows under bottleneck due to the algorithms lack of visibility of buffer content where the flows reside. We address both concerns by proposing DiffPerf, an in-network bandwidth allocation system. At a macroscopic level, DiffPerf elastically allocates bandwidth to performance-centric service classes pre-defined by access provider, and at a microscopic level it relies on a lightweight learning algorithm to statistically differentiate and isolate traffic flows in each class to help them achieve better performance in an online and dynamic manner. We built two SDN-based prototypes of DiffPerf; one on OpenDaylight with OpenFlow Brocade hardware switches and the other with data plane Intel Tofino hardware switches. We evaluate it from an application perspective for ABR video streaming as it accounts for a majority of the Internet traffic. Our evaluations demonstrate the practicality and flexibility that DiffPerf provides access providers with capabilities through which a spectrum of qualities are provisioned at multiple classes and assists users within the same class in achieving better fairness and improving overall user-perceived quality.