A Software-Defined Queuing Framework for QoS Provisioning in 5G and Beyond Mobile Systems

There is an ever-increasing demand for network technologies supporting Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) services and their co-existence with best-effort traffic. By way of example, reference can be made to the emerging 5G mobile networks. In this vein, this article investigates the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology capabilities for providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. Specifically, we present a testbed, under development, dubbed Soft-ware-Defined Queueing (SDQ). This framework leverages QoS provision functionalities of SDN. SDQ can be regarded as a framework for testing traffic engineering solutions in networks with deterministic QoS support. By using SDQ, we develop and test a specific solution that chooses the optimal queue and path for each incoming flow in order to reduce the workload imbalances in the network. For the experimental setup, we consider a generic SDN network whose bridges include three priority queues at every output port. Furthermore, we compare the aforementioned solution with a best-effort network and an SDN-enabled network with QoS support configured by default. The obtained results show that the envisioned solution outperforms the baseline one of SDN and the best-effort solution in terms of the average latency recorded.