Software-defined inter-networking: Enabling coordinated QoS control across the internet

Software-Defined Networking can be used to easily provision paths for business applications. However, such provisioning is static and is furthermore lost when application flows cross over to another operator domain. This paper proposes an online mechanism (SDNI) that considers application requirements and uses SDN to negotiate traffic policies between neighbouring operator domains. Hence, SDNI enables the hop-by-hop creation of end-to-end paths that are appropriately provisioned for application flows. A prototype and a small-scale testbed have been implemented to assess SDNI's feasibility. Early results show that SDNI overhead does not affect application performance in various use cases, while the benefits of SDNI are evident.