Using Software-Defined Networking for Real-Time Internet Applications

We consider an emerging class of challenging Internet applications called Real-Time Online Interactive Applications (ROIA). Examples of ROIA are multiplayer online games, computationand interaction-intensive training, simulationbased e-learning, etc. These applications make high QoS demands on the underlying network which involve the number of users and the actual application state and, therefore, vary at runtime. In traditional networks, the reconfiguration possibilities of the network to meet the dynamic QoS demands of ROIA are limited due to the lack of control of the network. The emerging architecture of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) decouples the control and forwarding logic from the network infrastructure, making it programmable for applications. This paper describes the specification, design and implementation of a novel Northbound API for developing ROIA that can use the advantages of SDN. We describe the basic architectural design of the SDN Module which implements the API functionality required by ROIA, and we report experimental testing and evaluation results for its prototype implementation.