FUTURE INTERNET ARCHITECTURE AND TESTBEDS
Software Defined Traffic Engineering for Improving
Quality of Service
Xiaoming Li1, Jinyao Yan2,*, Hui Ren1
1
Key Laboratory of Acoustic Visual Technology and Intelligent Control System (Ministry of Culture) and Beijing Key Laboratory of Modern
Entertainment Technology, Communication University of China, Beijing, 100024, China
2
Key Lab of Media, Audio and Video, Communication University of China, Beijing, 100024, China
* The corresponding author, email: jyan@cuc.edu.cn
Abstract: The Software Defined Networking
(SDN) paradigm separates the control plane
from the packet forwarding plane, and pro-
vides applications with a centralized view of
the distributed network state. Thanks to the
flexibility and efficiency of the traffic flow
management, SDN based traffic engineering
increases network utilization and improves
Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, an
SDN based traffic scheduling algorithm
called CATS is proposed to detect and con-
trol congestions in real time. In particular, a
new concept of aggregated elephant flow is
presented. And then a traffic scheduling opti-
mization model is formulated with the goal of
minimizing the variance of link utilization and
improving QoS. We develop a chaos genetic
algorithm to solve this NP-hard problem. At
the end of this paper, we use Mininet, Flood-
light and video traces to simulate the SDN
enabled video networking. We simulate both
the case of live video streaming in the wide
area backbone network and the case of video
file transferring among data centers. Simula-
tion results show that the proposed algorithm
CATS effectively eliminates network conges-
tions in subsecond. In consequence, CATS
Recieved: May 29, 2017
Revised: Sep. 5, 2017 improves the QoS with lower packet loss rate
Editor: Tao Huang and balanced link utilization.
12
Keywords: SDN; traffic engineering/traffic
scheduling; aggregated elephant flow; conges-
tion; link utilization; QoS; video streaming
I. INTRODUCTION
The Visual Networking Index report from
Cisco Systems predicts that Internet video
will account for 82 percent of Internet traf-
fic worldwide in 2020[1]. Global IP traffic
will increase roughly threefold over the next
five years. With the dramatically increasing
amounts of network traffic, traffic congestion
happens often and the performance degrades
in the network. For a long time in the past, the
telecom operators increased the capacity of
the network by improving the network hard-
ware using high-speed switches and routers.
However, this over-provisioning solution had
a low and unbalanced utilization and can not
solve the congestion of hot spots effectively.
Congestion may appear in some links of net-
work while the rest of the network might be
light loaded or idle. Traffic engineering (TE)
analyzes and predicts the traffic, manages
the route of the traffic request to improve the
network utilization and to optimize the over-
all performance of data network [2]. In the
meantime, network congestions are eliminated
China Communications • October 2017
[3][4] which is critical to multimedia services
such as Netflix [5].
Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)
[6], as a solution of traffic engineering, explic-
itly labels routing between source and destina-
tion which can control the traffic distribution.
However, labels in MPLS TE are configured
statically without real time reconfiguration
ability and adaptability. Software Defined
Networking (SDN) has become a promising
solution to enhance the flexibility and adapt-
ability of traffic engineering[7][8]. Network
traffic can be flexibly scheduled by making
use of the centralized network view and dy-
namic configuration capabilities of SDN. The
global view includes the state of network, the
utilization of the network and amount of cur-
rent traffic which is maintained by the SDN
controller. SDN based TE controls and man-
ages the traffic in the network in real time, and
obtains better QoS performance such as delay,
throughput and bandwidth utilization.
In this paper, we study congestion-aware
dynamic traffic engineering based on SDN and
proposed a traffic scheduling algorithm called
CATS to eliminate network congestion and to
improve QoS. The main contributions of this
paper are as follows:
1) We propose the definition of aggregated el-
ephant flow sharing congested links and its
detection algorithm for traffic engineering.
2) We propose an optimization model for traf-
fic scheduling with a goal to minimize the
variance of link utilization and QoS.
3) B y using the chaos genetic algorithm to
solve the optimization problem, we propose
SDN-based congestion-aware traffic sched-
uling algorithm (CATS).
Simulations using video traffic traces show
that our proposed traffic scheduling algorithm
is able to effectively detect and eliminate
network congestions in subsecond. In conse-
quence, it improves the QoS for applications
with lower packet loss rate and balanced link
utilization.
The rest of this paper is organized as fol-
lows. Section II reviews related work of SDN
based traffic engineering and QoS for mul-
China Communications • October 2017
timedia services. Section III describe SDN-
based congestion-aware traffic engineering
including aggregated elephant flow detection
algorithm, network model and optimization
problem, and traffic scheduling algorithm. Ex-
periments results are described and analyzed
in section IV. Section V concludes the paper.
II. RELATED WORK
Traffic engineering has been an important
mechanism and a research topic to improve
the performance in Internet for decades. QoS
routing algorithms are kinds of mechanisms
of IP based traffic engineering to find optimal
path in terms of network performance such as
delay and bandwidth. OpenQoS [9] classifies
the traffic into data and multimedia, and the
routes of multimedia flows are optimized with
a QoS routing algorithm. HiQoS [10] makes
use of multiple paths between source and des-
tination and queuing mechanisms to optimize
QoS. Equal-Cost-Multi-path routing (ECMP)
[11][12] is a solution to find multiple optimal
routes which is considered more efficient than
single path QoS routing. The main feature of
ECMP is to equally split and forward flows to
multiple paths for load balancing. The traffic
load will be more balanced when the ECMP
traffic scheduling is made in packet level in-
stead of flow level. However, the bandwidth,
latency, and reliability of each path may be not
same in the actual network. WCMP (weight-
ed Equal-Cost-Multi-path) routing [13] was
proposed to split traffic in proportion to the
capacity of paths, which is a special case of
ECMP. This method is more complicated in
the traditional switch with a high cost.
In the SWAN(software-driven wide area
network)[14] architecture, SWAN enables
software driven inter-DC WANs to carry
significantly more traffic. SWAN leverages
a small amount of scratch capacity on links
to apply updates in order to ensure that there
is no transient congestion. SWAN improves
bandwidth efficiency while providing prefer-
ence for higher-priority services and fairness
among similar services. In the Cisco CON-
13
 GA[15] architecture, TCP streams are divided
into multiple flowlets and flowlets are allocat-
ed to multiple paths. This enables CONGA to
efficiently balance the load for data centers.
HULA[16]} addresses the scalability issue of
CONGA with P4-based switches maintaining
congestion state for the best next hop per des-
tination instead of all paths to a destination.
MicroTe [17] minimizes the maximum link
utilization with some modifications to hosts in
the data center. Hosts in MicroTe collect and
report their traffic matrix to the SDN control-
ler for optimization. Traffic Engineering in an
incrementally deployed SDN environment is
proposed in [18] where traditional networks
are mixed with a small number of SDN en-
abled devices. In segment Routing, the routing
path is broken up into segments. With the help
of SDN, segment routing controls the traffic
and online route selection in order to enable
better network utilization and QoS [19][20]. In
Hedera [21], a flow with flow rate more than
10% of the link capacity is considered as large
flow. The SDN controller sends a traffic statis-
tics request to edge switches in a certain peri-
od to detect the large flow. Whenever a large
Traffic Engineering Application
StatisticsCollector Congestion-Aware Traffic Scheduling
Module Module Module
Aggregate Flow Detection,
Flow Scheduling
Northbound:RestfulAPI
SDN Controller
OFFlowStatsEntry(etc.
OFPortStatsEntry(etc.
Flow.bytes, flow match Link Static Flow
count,flow.srcDPID,flow.d
Port.no, port bandwidth
Discovery Entry Pusher
used)
stDPID)
Southbound:OpenFlow
SDN Switch SDN Switch
SDN Switch
Fig. 1 The SDN-based traffic engineering
14
flow is detected then it is rescheduled to light
loaded links that meet their bandwidth de-
mand. By default, Hedera uses ECMP for flow
forwarding. Different from Hedera, Mahout
finds the large flow by detecting TCP buffer of
end nodes[22]. In Hedera, flow is defined with
the same 10-tuple of <src MAC, dst MAC,
src IP, dst IP, EtherType, IP protocol, TCP src
port, dst port, VLAN tag, input port>. Howev-
er, Internet video flows as a whole usually ac-
count for most network traffic while each flow
is much less than 10% of link capacity. Aggre-
gated flows such as video streaming are from
the same video-sharing site may exceeds 10%
of the link capacity and introduce congestions.
They may be considered as an elephant flow in
some sense for traffic engineering to improve
QoS.
III. SDN BASED TRAFFIC ENGINEERING
As traditional traffic engineering could not ad-
just traffic dynamically, we study real-time and
optimal traffic engineering based on SDN. The
centralized controller in SDN first detects the
aggregated flow traffic when link utilization is
high and congestions happen, then computes
the flow allocation on optimal routes and the
forwarding rules for the traffic scheduling,
finally distribute the flow rules to SDN switch-
es. Compared to traditional traffic engineering,
the main advantage of SDN based traffic engi-
neering is: traffic are detected and rescheduled
from global view rather than local view of the
traffic and the utilization of links. Moreover,
due to the flexibility of SDN, SDN based traf-
fic engineering can detect and eliminate the
congestion in real-time. As shown in figure 1,
SDN-based traffic engineering includes three
layers and interaction between them.
In this section, we first define the aggre-
gated elephant flow and design the detection
algorithm for aggregated elephant flows. Then
we design the congestion-aware dynamic traf-
fic scheduling including the network model,
the optimization problem for balancing the
link utilization and the overall QoS, and a traf-
fic scheduling algorithm to solve the optimiza-
China Communications • October 2017
tion problem.
3.1 Aggregated elephant flow
detection
Traditional flow and traffic engineering are
based on IP. SDN/OpenFlow [23] defines
flows with various granularity such as source/
destination switches, VLAN and application
types. In Hedera, each elephant flow is a sin-
gle large flow over a certain size (10% of the
link) and duration, identified with the same
10-tuple of <src MAC, dst MAC, src IP, dst
IP, EtherType, IP protocol, TCP src port, dst
port, VLAN tag, input port>. Internet video
flows as a whole account for the most network
traffic as Cisco VNI report predicts. However,
each video flow is usually much less than 10%
of link capacity. As opposed to individual ele-
phant flow, we use SDN/OpenFlow to aggre-
gate some flows into a big flow termed aggre-
gated elephant flow: the flows are aggregated
into one aggregated elephant flow when
1) flows share the congested link and share
part of their path;
2) flows are video flows or big enough flows
(for example: each flow is bigger than 1%
of the congested link).
For example, we may bundle flows of video
or voip traffic from/to one campus network
as an aggregated elephant flow. Then we may
want to provide QoS for the aggregated flow
to upgrade the video and voip service for the
campus costumer, or when we may want to
retour those traffic to avoid the congestion link
they sharing.
In this paper, we label the aggregated el-
ephant flow with the source SDN/OpenFlow
switch DPID or destination SDN/OpenFlow
switch DPID of video flows for the simplicity
reason. We assume that SDN/OpenFlow en-
abled switches and routers might coexist with
traditional ones in the network. SDN control-
ler communications with and controls only
SDN/OpenFlow enabled switches. As long as
Src_DPID or Dst_DPID is the same, they are
in the same aggregated elephant flow, even
their source IP and destination IP are not the
same.
China Communications • October 2017
We make use of the passive detection of
congestion in SDN/OpenFlow network. The
SDN controller defines the congestion level
for OpenFlow switches. For example, when
the link utilization is higher than a threshold
of 90%, then switches will send a congestion
notification via the Packet_in message to the
SDN controller [24]. The controller receives
the message, and the message is parsed to ob-
tain the following information:
1) T he location of congestion by “switch
ID”(data path identification or DPID);
2) Big flows on the congested link by “byte
counters”.
The SDN controller calculates the counter
of the flow meter of the congested switch to
find flows that occupies more than certain
amount of link utilization or video flows. In
the following, we summarize our algorithm to
detect the aggregated elephant flow for traffic
engineering.
Algorithm 1: Aggregated elephant flow de-
tection algorithm
Input: The flow Table entry set(OFFlow-
StatsEntry) of the congested switch which is
collected through the StatisticsCollector mod-
ule of the SDN controller.
Output: An aggregated elephant flow:
ret=1 when a single flow as an elephant flow;
ret=2 when aggregated flows as an aggregat-
ed elephant flow. The flow set flowset F in the
aggregated elephant flow.
Algorithm 1 Aggregated elephant flow detection algorithm
1: ret=0;
F=null;
flowentryset=StatisticsCollector.OF FlowStatsEntry;
flowentryset.sortbybytesize;
2: FOR flowj ∈ flowentryset do
3: IF (flowj.bytes ≥ THRESHOLD) THEN
4: RETURN ret=1;
5: FOR flowi ∈ flow entryset and flowj ∈ flowentryset do
6: IF (flowi.srcDPID=flowj.srcDPID)
or flowi.dstDPID=flowj.dstDPID THEN
7: F.add(flowi) and F.add(flowj);
8: IF(F.bytes≥THRESHOLD)
THEN
9: RETURN ret=2;

15
 Whenever congestion is detected, the
switch sends a congestion notification to the
controller via the Packet_in messages in the
OpenFlow protocol. As described above in the
aggregated elephant flow detection algorithm,
it is necessary to sort firstly all flows in the
flow set of the switch flow table. Flows are
sorted in terms of flow size or importance.
Only important video flows may be consid-
ered for simplicity or in case of limit network
resource. Then the algorithm detects a single
flow or flows as an aggregated elephant flow
when their flow.bytes ≥ THRESHOLD.
3.2 Traffic scheduling
As described above, flows in the aggregated
elephant flow are detected by the aggregat-
ed elephant flow detection algorithm. In this
subsection, we first find the set of optimal
candidate path for the flow allocation. Then,
we propose an optimization model for flow
scheduling to optimize the link utilization
and overall QoS. To solve the optimization
problem, we use the chaos genetic algorithm
to calculate the optimal distribution matrix for
the aggregated elephant flow.
1) Network model: V is a set of all switch
nodes, and E is a set of links between switch-
es. The network is represented by a direct-
Table I Notations in the model
Notation Description
V a set of all switch nodes
E a set of links between switches
V′ a set of optimal residual network nodes
E′ a set of edge of optimal residual network
Cr (euv ) Residual capacity of a network link euv
PVe Path vector of link e
BU Bandwidth Utilization
CPS Candidate path set
F Flow set in aggregated elephant flow
FAM Flow allocation matrix
FRV Flow request vector
e Edge e ∈ E
Whether the path i is selected by flow j
aij
(0 for not selected or 1 for selected)
Whether the link e belong to a path i
bi
(0 for not selected or 1 for selected)
16
ed-graph G = (V , E ) . The capacity C (u , v) of a
link from node u to v is defined as the phys-
ical bandwidth of the link. The flow request
vector FRV is a set of flows to be allocated.
Then the congestion-aware traffic scheduling
is to find the optimal flow allocation matrix
FAM for flows in FRV . The main notations
are described in table 1.
Definition 1: Flow request vector FRV
Flow request vector FRV represents the set
of flows to be allocated which includes flows
in flow set F in aggregated elephant flow
and incoming flows in traffic prediction. For
traffic scheduling of the aggregated elephant
flow in this paper, flow request vector FRV
is the same as flow set F . Let N denotes the
s i z e o f FRV . FRV = [ flow1 , flow2 , flowN ]T .
1, 2...N .
flow j ∈ FRV , j =
Definition 2: Flow allocation matrix FAM
FAM is the flow allocation matrix for flow
request vector FRV . Then FAM is a matrix
of M × N , where M represents the number of
candidate paths.
 a11 a12  a1N 
a a2 N 
 21 a22 
     
 
 aM 1 aM 2  aMN 
0, flow j not select pathi
aij =   (1)
1, flow j select pathi
M
1 ≤ i ≤ M ,1 ≤ j ≤ N , ∑ aij ≤ 1.  (2)
i =1
M
As can be seen from the condition ∑a
i =1
ij ≤1 ,
the allocation is based on the flow. Namely, a
flow is assigned to at most one candidate path.
Definition 3: Optimal residual network Gr
Given the network G = (V , E ) and flow
request set FRV , the optimal residual net-
w o r k f o r FRV : Gr = (V ′ , E ′ ) i s f o r m e d
by the top M optimal paths between
Src _ DPID and Dst _ DPID of aggregated
elephant flow. The top optimal paths are
found with k-shortest path algorithm[25].
E ′ = {euv ∈ V ′ × V ′ : Cr (u , v) > 0}
Definition 4: The maximum feasible capac-
ity of the optimal residual network maxC (Gr )
The maximum feasible capacity of the op-
timal residual network indicates that the maxi-
China Communications • October 2017

mum capacity in the residual network. We can
solve the maximum flow problem using Ford
Fulkerson algorithm [26]. In this model, the
top-M optimal candidate path set CPS (candi-
date path set) is chosen as augmenting paths to
get the maximum flow maxC (Gr ) . By defini-
tion, it satisfies the max flow/min cut theory.
Definition 5: The maximum admitta-
ble flows in the optimal residual network
maxCaccept ( FRV )
A s s u m i n g ∀euv ∈ E ′ i f ∃ ∩ik=1 pathi = euv
and 1 ≤ i, k ≤ M , pathi ∈ CPS , then these paths
intersect at the link euv . Then link euv be-
longs to the path vector can be expressed
as a column vector of 1× M dimension
PVe = [b1 , b2 , b3 ,bM ] .
uv
0, e ∈ pathi
bi =  uv
1, euv ∉ pathi
The maximum admittable flows
maxCaccept ( FRV ) are flows satisfying the fol-
lowing conditions
1) ( PVe × ( FAM × FRV )) / Cr (euv ) ≤ 1, ∀euv ∈ E ′ .
uv
M
2) Maximizing ∑c
i =1
i1 ,∀ci1 ∈ FAM × FRV .
Condition 1 guarantees that the allocated
flow rate of the link is less than the avail-
able bandwidth of the link. By definition,
we can see that the maximum feasible flow
is not necessarily the maximum admitta-
ble aggregate flow. As shown in figure 2,
the optimal residual network is composed
of the candidate optimal paths. The source
is S1 , destination is S 4 , there are 4 routes
path path1={e1,e2,e3,e4}, path2={e5,e6,e4},
path3={e1,e2,e7}, path4={e5,e6,e3,e7}.
According to the Ford Fulkerson algo-
rithm can find the maximum feasible flow:
28Mbps , assume flow request vector FRV is:
[11,9,8,5]T , its maximum admittable aggregat-
ed flows: [11,8,5] = 24Mbps .
Deduction 1: maxCaccept ( FRV ) ≤ maxC (Gr ) . If
maxCaccept ( FRV ) = maxC (Gr ) , then according to
the maximum flow and minimum cut theorem
∃euv ∈ E ′ , ( PVe × ( FAM × FRV )) / Cr (euv ) =
uv
1.
M
Deduction 2: If max ∑ F AM × FRV =
0,
i =1
candidate paths could not allocate aggregated
flows.
China Communications • October 2017
M
Proof: Because max ∑ F AM × FRV =
0 , so
i =1
∀euv ∈ E ′ , ( PVeuv × ( FAM × FRV )) / Cr (euv ) > 1
Namely, for ∀flow ∈ FRV , there is no
∃path ∈ CPS could allocate flow requests.
As CPS is the optimal path set, there is no
other path in the network with more available
bandwidth than path in CPS . Therefore, the
flows are not admitable to the current network.
2 ) O p t i m i z a t i o n p ro b l e m f o r f l o w
scheduling: Existing objectives for traffic op-
timization are minimizing the maximum link
utilization [27] and minimizing link cost [28].
The latter may lead to uneven distribution of
traffic in the network and traffic congestion
in the low cost path. The objective in our op-
timization problem is close to the first one.
(3)
However, we consider that the variance of link
utilization ratio is an important index of the
distribution of link bandwidth utilization as
opposed to the average link utilization and the
maximum link utilization which are not suffi-
cient to show the balance of the link utilization.
The smaller variance of link utilization, the
closer utilization among links. Then, the over-
all utilization of the links is more balanced.
The higher link utilization, the higher packet
loss rate of the link. Given the certain amount
of traffic, the balanced utilization of con-
gestion links produces lowest overall packet
loss rate. As a result, the overall performance
and QoS of network are improved. Assume
∀euv ∈ E ′ , BU=
uv ( PVe × ( FAM × FRV )) / Cr (euv ) ,
uv
BU uv represents the bandwidth utiliza-
tion of the link euv . The sample space
S5
e6:15Mbps
S6
e5:15Mbps e4:25Mbps
e3:10Mbp
10Mbps
S1 S4
e1:15Mbps e7:6Mbps
e2:13Mbps
S2 S3
Fig. 2 Optimal residual network composed of candidate optimal paths
17
 M
of BU is S :{BU i } . Sample variance is max ∑ F AM × FRV =
0 , then it indicates that
N

∑ ( BU
i =1
− BU ) 2
i
the optimal candidate path can not meet all
D( BU ) = i =1
. Therefore, the
N −1 request of flows in the flow set.
objective of flow reallocation is to mini- 3) Chaos genetic algorithm to solve the
mize D( BU ) . optimization problem: Because the mathemat-
We form the optimization problem as fol- ical model (4) is a combinatorial optimization
lows: problem of NP hard (in particular, 0-1 integrat-
N

∑ ( BU i − BU ) 2
 (4)
ed linear programming problem). The genetic
Minimize D( BU ) = i =1
algorithm is more suitable for combinatorial
N −1
 optimization problem [30], and the crossover
subject to and mutation operators have typical combi-
M
nation features. In order to avoid the local
∑a i =1
ij ≤ 1,1 ≤ j ≤ N  (Constr. 1)
optimal solution, we use the genetic algorithm
M
=∑ ci1 maxCaccept ( FRV ), ∀ci1 ∈ FAM × FRV based on chaotic map [31]. The parameters for
i =1
the algorithm are set as follows:
 (Constr. 2)
Population number: popsize, each popula-
∑ f low(u, v) = 0 
v∈V
(Constr. 3)
tion represents a distribution matrix;
 Genetic times: GeneticNum;
Constraint 1 guarantees that each flow can N

∑ ( BU i − BU ) 2
only choose one path; Constraint 2 guarantees Fitness function: D( BU ) = i =1

that the flow allocation matrix can satisfy the N −1

Gene crossover probability: 0.6;
maximum acceptable capacity of the existing
Mutation probability: 0.1;
candidate paths; Constraint 3 guarantees the
When the population is initialized, the lo-
flow conservation in the residual network. The
gistic function is used as a chaotic map
net flow entering the node u is 0 except that
In this algorithm, the logistic function is
u is the source or the terminal of flows;
used as the initial value of the chaotic map
As the optimization problem (4) is a 0-1
with xn +1 = µ × xn × (1 − xn ) , where µ ∈[0, 4] is
integrated linear programming problem, it is
the parameter of logistic function. Our studies
an NP-Hard problem [29]. Please note that if
show that if x ∈[0,1] , logistic mapping is in
a chaotic state. And the iteration is consistent
Algorithm 2: Genetic algorithm for flow scheduling with a state of pseudo random distribution
Input: Flow request vector FRV , candidate path set CPS . when µ is close to 4.
Output: Flow allocation matrix FAM 4) SDN-based congestion-aware traffic
Algorithm 2: Genetic algorithm for flow scheduling scheduling algorithm (CATS): First SDN
1: According to candidate path set, ∀euv ∈ E ′ , obtain link euv belongs to the path controller collects the congestion switch
vector PVe uv OFFlowStatsEntry b y O p e n F l o w m o d u l e
2: v = Init ( popsize) StatisticsCollector . By aggregated elephant
v = logistic(v) flow detection algorithm, when the return ret
fitness (v)
is 2, it triggers aggregated traffic scheduling
3: FOR i ≤ GeneticNum do
algorithm which returns an aggregate flow al-
4: IF ( f .bytes ≥ THRESHOLD ) THEN
5: select (v) ; location matrix. SDN controller generates the
6: crossover (v) ; flow Table according to the matrix, and down-
7: mutation(v) ; loads flow Table to switches of candidate path.
8: fitness (v) ; The pseudo-code description of the algorithm
9: RETURN FAM ; is as follows:


18 China Communications • October 2017

IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND
ANALYSIS
As mentioned above, we use the chaos genetic
algorithm to solve the flow scheduling prob-
lem when congestion detected, and flows are
redistributed by the SDN controller. We con-
duct two sets of experiments. The first groups
of experiments are video streaming in a wide
area backbone network such as video for a
live event. The second experiments are video
file transferring among data centers of CDN.
We use the virtual switch OVS, and floodlight
v1.2 as controller which supports OpenFlow
1.3. We use video traces [32] to generate live
UDP video streams in the first experiments
and transfer video files over TCP in the second
experiments.
4.1 Experiments of video streaming
in a wide area backbone network
The experimental topology of live video
streaming is illustrated in figure 4. The OVS
switches are S1, S2  S7. The capacity of
each link is 100Mbps . Video flows are steam-
ing from server h8 to clients h1 , h2 and h3
and streaming from server h9 to clients h4 ,
h5 , h6 and h7 respectively. By default, Dijk-
stra’s algorithm is used in the SDN controller
for computing the shortest path. The shortest
path from switch S1 to switch S 4 is (e8, e9) .
We use the 4K video trace of “Tears of Steel”
for streaming. The video trace is obtained
from the video trace website (trace.eas.asu.
edu). The arrival interval of video flows fol-
lows Poisson distribution with λ = 2 . We use
D-ITG [33] to generate the background flow
traffic with a Pareto distribution on/off model,
where the shape and scale parameters are set
to 1.5 and 200 respectively.
Algorithm 3: SDN-based congestion-aware traffic scheduling algorithm (CATS)
Input: Flow Table entries of congested switch, OFFlowStatsEntry collected by the
Statistics Collector module of SDN controller.
Output: The flow allocation matrix FAM
Algorithm 3: SDN-based congestion-aware traffic scheduling algorithm CATS
1: ret = 0 ;
FAM = null ;
2: IF ( switch.congestion ≥ Congestion.THRESHOLD ) THEN
3: Aggregate Flow Detect Algorithm ;
4: RETURN ret ;
5: IF ∃path satisfying flow.bytes < path.capacity and ret = 1 THEN
6: use path transfer flow
7: IF ret = 2 THEN
8: ChaosGeneticalgorithmforflowscheduling ;
9: RETURN FAM ;
10: Generating a flow Table according to FAM
11: SDN controller send the flow Table according to the switch DPID of CPS

h 11

h 12 e6:100 Mbps
S5 S6
h1 h8
e5:100 Mbps e10 :100 Mbps e4:100 Mbps
100 Mbps e3:100 Mbps
h2 e8:100 Mbps e9:100 Mbps
S1 S7 S4

e1:100 Mbps e7:100 Mbps h9

h 15
h3

e2:100 Mbps
… S2 S3
…
…
h7 h 13 h 14
1

Fig. 3 Network topology generated in Mininet

China Communications • October 2017 19

 At the time of 14th second in our exper-
iment, congestion occurs and is detected on
link e9 . The link e9 notifies the floodlight
controller with Packet _ in message, then
triggers our SDN-based congestion-aware
traffic scheduling algorithm CATS. At time of
congestion, the flow rates from server h8 to
gregated elephant flow.
We select the top 4 candidate paths from S1
to S4 based on pre-k shortest paths algorithm
as follows.
path 1={e1,e2,e3,e4}, path 2={e5,e6,e4},
path3={e1,e2,e7}, path4={e8,e9}.
The path vector PVe , which is the link
i

h1, h 2 and h3 are 6.73Mbps, 6.82Mbps and ei belongs to, is expressed as follows:
0.988Mbps respectively, and flow rates from PVe = [1,0,1,0] , PVe = [1,0,1,0] , PVe = [1,0,0,0] ,
1 2 3

server h9 to h 4, h5, h6 and h7 are 6.8Mbps, PVe = [1,1,0,0] , PVe = [0,1,0,0] , PVe = [0,1,0,0] ,
4 5 6

8.68Mbps, 6.73Mbps and 0.165Mbps respec- PVe = [0,0,1,0] , PVe = [0,0,0,1] , PVe = [0,0,0,1]
7 8 9

tively. Table 2 shows the physical bandwidth The optimal residual network composed of
and residual bandwidth for each edge. The the candidate paths is shown in figure 4.
remaining bandwidth of edge e9 is 43.6Mbps, After the reallocation by our SDN-based
namely background traffic is 56.4Mbps. congestion-aware traffic scheduling algorithm
However total flow rate allocated by OSPF CATS, the flow allocation matrix FAM is as
is 36.913Mbps (where 6.73 + 0.165 + 0.988 follows:
+6.82 + 6.8 + 8.68 + 6.73 =36.913). As a re- 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
sult, the utilization rate of link e9 reaches up 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 

to 93.3% ((36.913+56.4)/100). About 36.913% 0 1 1 0 0 1 0
 
of the physical bandwidth is occupied by 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
flows going from S1 to S4. Then, flows to X-axis represents 7 flows from servers
h1, h 2, h3, h 4, h5, h6, h7 are aggregated as an ag- to h7, h6, h5, h4, h3, h 2, h1 respectively. Y-axis
indicates path1 , path2 , path3 , path4 , where 0 in-
Table II Residual bandwidth in the backbone network dicates the path is not selected, and 1 indicates
Edge Residual bandwidth Physical bandwidth selected.
E1 55.5 100 As ECMP is a commonly used meth-
e2 55.5 100 od to balance the traffic in the data cen-
e3 37.1 100 ters, we use ECMP with 4 candidate paths
e4 53.4 100 path1 , path2 , path3 , path4 for comparison. We
e5 58 100 also compare the performance of the proposed
e6 57.7 100 algorithm with OSPF [34] which is based on
e7 48.5 100 Dijkstra’s algorithm. The experimental results
e8 64.3 100 of link utilization of all candidate paths are
e9 43.6 100 shown in figure 5. It can be seen from the fig-
ure, the variance of link utilization based on
traditional OSPF is high, indicating that the
link utilization is not balanced. Our algorithm
e6:57.7
57 Mbps
57.7
S5 S6
is triggered at 14th second when congestion
e5:58Mbpss e4:53.4Mbps
bps happened, and then it reduces the variance of
e3:37.1M
1Mbps link utilization. The variance of link utiliza-
e9:43.6Mbps
S1
e8:64.3Mbpss S4 tion based on OSPF, ECMP and CATS right
S7
after 14th second is 0.032125, 0.008803 and
e1:55.5Mbps
bps e7:48.5Mbps
bps
0.0036928 respectively. The link utilization
improved with our proposed algorithm . There
e2:55.5Mbpss
S2 S3 is no fully loaded link and no idle link with
our algorithm. The overall variance of link
Fig. 4 Optimal residual network utilization based on OSPF, ECMP and CATS

20 China Communications • October 2017

is 0.040519,0.023269,0.022705 respectively.
The overall variance of link utilization based
on ECMP and our proposed algorithm are al-
most the same.
Figure 6 shows the link utilization of link
e9 with OSPF, ECMP and CATS. It can be
seen from the figure that based on the tradi-
tional OSPF algorithm, the utilization rate of
10.558170 seconds in the sixty-fifth generation
with the result of 0.0036928. Therefore, we
propose the chaotic genetic algorithm to solve
the optimization problem of traffic scheduling
as the convergence time is critical for real time
0.09

the e9 at the 14th second link is as high as

0.08 ECMP CATS OSPF
93.3085%, and in most cases the link utiliza-
tion is kept close to 100%, which will produce 0.07
high packet loss for video streaming. In our

Variance of link utilization

0.06
proposed algorithm, the link utilization over
90% triggers CATS scheduling algorithm. As 0.05
shown in the figure, the utilization of link e9
is significantly decreased after scheduling. 0.04

From figure 5 we can see that ECMP can bal-

0.03
ance the traffic significantly better than OSPF
because ECMP splits traffic based on flows on 0.02

four paths while OSPF does not balance the

0.01
traffic. However, the ECMP algorithm does
not take into account the volume of flows and 0
the real time state of the link. Therefor the link

103
109
115
121
127
133
139
145
151
157
163
169
175
181
187
193
199
13
19
25
31
37
43
49
55
61
67
73
79
85
91
97
1
7

Time(Second)
utilization reaches up to 100% sometimes.
From figure 7, we can see packet loss rate
on link e9 with traditional OSPF algorithm, Fig. 5 Variance of link utilization of candidate paths
ECMP and CATS. Packet loss occurs most
often with OSPF routing algorithm. This is
because OSPF does not take into account the
1.2
current link state and traffic load balance. Our
proposed algorithm CATS performs best in
terms of packet loss rate. 1
The convergence of the chaotic genetic al-
gorithm that we proposed is shown in figure 8.
Bandwidth Utilization of Link e9

0.8
The algorithm converges after 1.5362 seconds
in the sixtieth generation with the utilization
variance of 0.0036928, which is close to the 0.6

optimal solution. Indeed, the scheduling result

is good enough within a second and reduce the
0.4
traffic congestion in real time. We compare
the performance of chaotic genetic algorithm CA
CATS ECMP OSPF
with simulated annealing algorithm to solve 0.2

the same problem. In the simulated anneal-

ing algorithm, we set the initial temperature 0
T0 = 1000 , termination temperature Tend = e −3 ,
103
109

121
127
133
139
145
151
157
163
169
175
181
187
193
199
115
13
19
25
31
37
43
49
55
61
67
73
79
85
91
97
1
7

Time(Second)
chain length L = 200 and cooling rate q = 0.9 .
As shown in figure 8, the simulated annealing
algorithm is close to the optimal solution after Fig. 6 Bandwidth link utilization of link e9

China Communications • October 2017 21

 traffic scheduling. tivity among Google data centers worldwide.
However we scale down the bandwidth and
4.2 Experiments of video file
delay for simplicity in Mininet.
transferring among data centers
In our experiments, we use Iperf to send
In this set of experiments, we setup our exper- TCP flow to simulate video file transferring
imental topology in figure 9 the same as Goo- and data synchronization. Flows go from serv-
gle B4 topology [35] which provides connec- ers h1, h 2, h3...h7 to h8, h9 through switches in
the network. Links are measuring the traffic
for congestion. Table 3 shows the physical
0.14 bandwidth and residual bandwidth for each
edge of Google B4 topology. When link e2 is
CATS OSPF ECMP
0.12 congested at 20th second in our experiments,
it sends Packet _ in messages to notify SDN
0.1 controller, then will trigger the SDN-based
Packet loss rate of Link e9

congestion-aware traffic scheduling algorithm

0.08 CATS. The flow rates of video file flows are
FRV = {1.93,1.68,1.44,1.31,0.762,0.989,1.32} i n
0.06 Mpbs at the time of 20th second. CATS algo-
rithm computes the top 3 candidate paths from
0.04 S6 to S10 based on k-shortest paths algorithm
as follows: path1={e6,e7,e8}, path2={e1,e2},
0.02 path3={e3,e4,e5}. Then, the optimal residual
network composed of the best candidate paths
0 is shown in figure 10.
106
113
120
127
134
141
148
155
162
169
176
183
190
197
15
22
29
36
43
50
57
64
71
78
85
92
99
1
8

After the reallocation by our SDN-based

Time(Second)
congestion-aware traffic scheduling algorithm
CATS, the flow allocation matrix RAM is as
Fig. 7 Packet loss rate of link e9 follows:
1 0 0 0 0 0 1 
0 1 1 0 0 0 0 
 
0 0 0 1 1 1 0 
−3
Comparison of convergence rate
4
x 10 X-axis represents flows from servers
Chotic genetic algorithm h1, h 2, h3, h 4, h5, h6, h7 to their destinations.
Simulated annealing algorithm
3.95 Y-axis indicates path1 , path2 , path3 , where 0 in-
dicates the path is not selected, and 1 indicates
3.9 selected.
The optimized value

Table III Residual bandwidth in the network

3.85
among data centers

3.8 Residual band- Physical band-

Edge
width width
3.75 e1 10 20
e2 0 10
3.7 e3 10 10
e4 15 15
3.65 e5 12 12
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Time(Second) e6 10 10
e7 15 15
Fig. 8 Convergence time e8 16 16

22 China Communications • October 2017

 After the flow scheduling, the variance of
link utilization is 0.0028988 and TCP packet
S12
loss rate is reduced as shown in figure 11.
From figure 11, we can see that when the link e1:20M
0M e2:10M
e2 from S12 to S10 congested around at the
20th second, it triggers our proposed traffic S0 15M
15 M S4 18M
18 M S6
e6:10M
0M
S5
e7:15M
5M
S8
e8:16M
S10
scheduling algorithm. We find that the packet e3:10M
e3 e5:12M
e5

loss rate of the congestion link is obviously re- 20M

M 20M
20M
20M
20 M
duced. The link from S6 to S5 is not used be-
fore traffic scheduling in the beginning. When
20M
20 M S3 18M
18 M e4:15M
5M 15M
15 M S11
S1 S2 15M
15 S9
the traffic scheduling algorithm CATS is S7

triggered at the 20th second, TCP flows from

h1 ... h7 are reallocated to path1 with the link Fig. 9 The simulation topology of Google B4
from S6 to S5 , then introduce packet loss on
the link e6 from S6 to S5 as shown in figure
12. h7 h1
h3 e7::15M
e7
S5 S8
As the aggressiveness of TCP congestion
h8
control algorithm, the packet loss rate will e6:1
e6:10M
0M e8:16
e8:16M
M

never go to zero at the bottleneck link. How- h4 e1:2

e1:20M
0M e2:1
e2:10M
0M
S0 15
15M
M S4 18M
18M S6 S12
S1 2 S10
10
ever we balance the link utilization with the
e3:1
e3:10M
0M e5:1
e5:12M
2M h9
increase of overall link utilization and the re- 18M
18 M

duction of the overall congestion. Indeed, the h5 h2 e4:1

e4:15M
5M
S2 S7 S9
overall file transmission time is also reduced.
Therefore, the overall performance and QoS in h6

the network is much improved with our pro-

posed SDN traffic scheduling algorithm.
Fig. 10 Optimal residual network in video le transferring

V. CONCLUSION
0.08
In this paper, we study the SDN based traffic
Packetloss rate of link from S12 to S10
engineering to improve the QoS for applica- 0.07
tions such as video streaming and video file
transferring. We propose traffic scheduling 0.06

using SDN to redistribute flows when conges-

0.05
tion happens. We introduce first a new concept
Packet loss rate

No scheduling

of aggregated elephant flow and a method to 0.04

Scheduling at 20 second
detect aggregate elephant flow for scheduling.
Then we propose a new traffic optimization 0.03

model and form into an optimization problem

0.02
with the objective to minimize the variance of
link utilization and to improve overall QoS.
0.01
Since the optimization problem is an NP-
hard problem, we propose the use of genetic 0
1
8
15
22
29
36
43
50
57
64
71
78
85
92
99
106

120
127
134
141
148
155
162
169
176
183
190
197
204
113

algorithm based on chaos theory to solve the

Time(Second)
optimization problem.

Fig. 11 TCP packet loss rate of link from S12 to S10 before and after trac schedul-
ing

China Communications • October 2017 23

 [8] T
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pus networks,” Acm Sigcomm Computer Com-
0.08
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work is partly supported by NSFC under
grant No.61371191 and No.61472389.
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China Communications • October 2017
Biographies
Xiaoming Li, is currently a
PhD student in Communication
University of China (CUC), his
current research interests in-
clude but not limited Software
Defined Networking (SDN),
Multimedia Cloud, Quality of
Service, Quality of Experience,
Network Management.
Jinyao Yan, the corresponding
author, received the B.S. degree
from Tianjin University, the M.S.
and Doctor (in engineering) de-
grees from Beijing Broadcasting
Institute, the Ph.D (in science)
degree from Swiss Federal Insti-
tute of Technology (ETH Zurich).
He is a Professor at Commu-
nication University of China, Beijing, P.R.China.His
research interests are in the areas of future network,
data-driven multimedia computing and networking.
Hui Ren, received the B.S. de-
gree from Liaoning Technical
University, the M.S. and Doctor
(in engineering) degrees from
China University of Mining and
Technology. He is currently
a member of the Institute of
Automation, a member of the
China Society of Electronics, a member of the Beijing
Institute of Electrical Engineering, a member of the
National Theater Standardization Technical Commit-
tee and a panel of science and technology projects in
Chaoyang District, Beijing. He is a Professor at Com-
munication University of China, Beijing, P.R.China.
25