Towards a real application-aware network

As the number of network services and applications increases, each one of them showing different requirements in terms of bandwidth and latency, it becomes critical for network operators to identify these applications. This paper builds up on the principles of Software Defined Networking, proposing a novel Application-Aware Network architecture, which is able to directly handle applications and their requirements; abstracting the complexity of dealing with network flows. Since metadata about applications are signalled either directly from the endpoints or from application managers, the information is precise and the approach can also be used for encrypted traffic. The benefits of the Application-Aware Approach for the network flow management is demonstrated in real network by two proof-of-concept services: aimed on quality of experience and load balancing.