MaaS: An application-centric, dynamic, end-to-end QoS framework utilizing SDN Federation

Internet is a collection of many distributed autonomous network domains. These domains deploy only limited control services amongst each other, most notably Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), primarily due to understandable security, integrity and management reasons. This construct can thus be attributed to hindering in development of powerful inter-domain control services that perform end-to-end network service provisioning such as QoS. The benefits though of having a dynamic end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning service for multi-domain networks are in tuning to real-time application resource requirements. The need for such an application-centric QoS framework is now more than ever as Internet traffic is continuously increasing and ability to provision network service in real-time at user application level would result in efficiency saving on under and overprovisioning. Existing end-to-end QoS frameworks such as IntServ and Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) lack dynamicity primarily attributed to distributed domain control-plane apart from also being hindered in deployment due to lack of activity in inter-domain control-plane as discussed previously. This Thesis proposes solution in form of a dynamic application-centric QoS framework utilizing Software Defined Networking (SDN) breakthrough. SDN controller is proposal of a centralized and thus dynamic domain control-plane, while collaboration between such per-domain control-planes referred to as SDN Federation enables ground for securing and enriching inter-domain control-plane as well, potentially improving upon the dynamicity limitations of legacy frameworks. The proposed framework named MPLS-as-a-Service (MaaS), is an implementation of prominent Internet Traffic Engineering (TE) framework - MPLS in SDN controller. The resultant SDN-MPLS control-plane made dynamic by SDN (Federation) enables network operators to swiftly provision QoS Label Switched Path (LSP)s and offer MPLS as a service model compared to present day long-term contracts. The complete design of MaaS is provided in the thesis, while the design of supporting underlying SDN-IP-BGP control-plane is also considered. This highlights a stand-out feature of the proposal as current research direction in end-to-end QoS provisioning is from outside domain control-plane orchestrated by third-party vendors, while we propose a native and in-network solution courtesy of this SDN-MPLS-IP-BGP control-plane. An easy to provision multi-domain network testbed is also created through virtual devices. MaaS and the underlying SDN control-plane is developed as well as demonstrated on this testbed. Apart from the dynamic inter-domain QoS property, MaaS is equipped with more adaptive error-handling through a service renegotiation mechanism and scalability enhancement measures over legacy MPLS which as well are demonstrated on the testbed.