User-Centric Network Provisioning in Software Defined Data Center Environment

Abstract

Present data center (DC) network provisioning schemes primarily utilize conventional load-balancing technologies, offering individual application performance improvement. Diversity in application usage however, makes isolated application prioritization a performance caveat for users with varying application trends. The present paper proposes a user profiling approach to capture application trends based on generic flow measurements (NetFlow) and employs the extracted profiles to create DC traffic forwarding policies. The scheme allows operators to define a global profile and application hierarchy based on extracted profiles to prioritize traffic for individual user classes. The proposed design was tested by extracting user profiles from a realistic enterprise network, and further simulated to dynamically manage DC traffic using the software defined networking paradigm. Compared to conventional traffic management schemes, the frame delivery ratio and effective throughput of our design was significantly higher for high priority north-south user traffic as well as the inter-server east-west application traffic.