Deterministic quality of service guarantee for dynamic service chaining in software defined networking

In this paper, we present a systemic approach to provide deterministic delay guarantee for dynamic service chaining in software defined networking (SDN). The delay performance of service chaining in SDN is affected by signaling message exchange in control plane and packet transmissions in data plane, respectively. First, we develop an analytical method to characterize the delay performance of control plane when handling traffic with different priorities according to network calculus (NC) and queuing theory. Second, taking into account the estimated delay in control plane, we propose a novel service traversal mechanism to calculate the optimal traversal path for the service chain. We demonstrate that NC delay analysis can provide deterministic quality of service (QoS)-guaranteed service chaining for any specified delay requirements, whereas theoretical queueing delay analysis can only provide statistical QoS guarantee. In summary, the proposed NC delay analysis can help to understand the network design for a future delay sensitive Internet in which deterministic latency must be guaranteed.