Soft-MPLSNet: Advanced QoS Control Plane for Softwarized MPLS Networks
Software-defined Networking, MPLS-TE, OpenFlow, Resource Allocation Control
The Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is a standard and consolidated networking technology that is still largely deployed. The Traffic Engineering (TE) is likely the most notable MPLS feature by which different technologies and actions are combined to provision service transport with Quality of Service (QoS) perspective to users. Though advancing beyond the ossified best-effort IP approach, multidimensional issues in both control and data planes, make MPLS-TE far from being optimal in provisioning QoS-guaranteed networking, mainly by deploying a high-complex and high-overhead architecture. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a consolidated paradigm that assists deploying new network architectures in a more flexibly and agnostic way. SDN provides important technological basis to evolve currently ossified IP approach towards the Future Internet, embodying new mechanisms and services to suit the rigorous requirements of QoS-constrained applications. The dynamicity, manageability, adaptability and net-programability capacities of the SDN architecture, makes it the ideal platform to enhance MPLS capabilities in providing QoS-guaranteed and scalable service transport. Therefore, this work exploits the SDN paradigm to deploy the Soft-MPLSNet, an MPLS softwarized architecture that embeds high-level control-plane. The Soft-MPLSNet provides the prospect to provision QoS-guaranteed service transport more efficiently than legacy MPLS approach, by means of a self-organized QoS-control features that follow the resource over-provisioning paradigm. The perspective is to afford QoS-demanding applications (i.e., multimedia) with acceptable Quality of Experience (QoE) over time, while maintaining the network performance for good scalability prospect.