A dynamic multipath scheduling protocol (DMSP) for full performance isolation of links in software defined networking (SDN)

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged to be an ultimate solution for the management of data centers. The separation of control plane from the data plane has made it possible to manage physical and virtual networks through the SDN controller. This paper presents a novel Dynamic Multipath Scheduling Protocol (DMSP) for effective scheduling of packets on SDN virtual links, thus achieving full performance isolation. The proposed solution reacts and adopts appropriate scheduling strategy during transitions. The source/destination mapping for path selection ensures service specific bandwidth for each pair of hosts in a multipath environment. DMSP makes real-time changes to select a least congested link for routing of data packets. The simulation results show that DMSP has better average end-to-end delay, packet drop ratio per flow, packet delivery ratio and packet drop ratio as compared to other scheduling techniques thus it improves resources utilization.