Application-Aware Flow Forwarding Service for SDN-Based Data Centers

Security and Quality of Service (QoS) in communication networks are critical factors supporting end-to-end dataflows in data centers. On the other hand, it is essential to provide mechanisms that enable different treatments for applications requiring sensitive data transfer. Both applications' requirements can vary according to their particular needs. To achieve their goals, it is necessary to provide services so that each application can request both the quality of service and security services dynamically and on demand. This article presents QoSS, an API web service to provide both Quality of Service and Security for applications through software-defined networks. We developed a prototype to conduct a case study to provide QoS and security. QoSS finds the optimal end-to-end path according to four optimization rules: bandwidth-aware, delay-aware, security-aware, and application requirements (considering the bandwidth, delay, packet loss, jitter, and security level of network nodes). Simulation results showed that our proposal improved end-to-end application data transfer by an average of 45%. Besides, it supports the dynamic end-to-end path configuration according to the application requirements. QoSS also logs each application's data transfer events to enable further analysis.