Evaluating Path Selection Strategies with Blockchain-based Routing in Multi-Domain SDNs

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as one of the most prolific inventions in the general area of computer communications over the past decade. Among many of the touted benefits, SDN architecture facilitated by OpenFlow has the potential to help network administrators to provide End-to-End (E2E) Quality of Service (QoS)-guaranteed paths for flows among networks while providing finer-granular flow management along with global network view. In our previous work, we have introduced QoSChain to amalgamate the advantages of blockchain and SDN for inter-network QoS provisioning to orchestrate an agile and software-driven traffic management framework in order to facilitate cross-network policy automation, assurance, E2E visibility, control and validation. In this study, we focus on the impact of the path selection strategies on the performance of the overall QoSChain performance. Specifically, we exploit three simple but effective path selection strategies, First Feasible Path Selection (FFPS), Random Feasible Path Selection (RFPS), and Minimum Hop Path Selection (MHPS), to evaluate their performance, impact, and overhead in terms of the flow setup time, message overhead, and network resource consumption metrics. Our preliminary simulations results show that the path selection plays an important role in the overall performance with hop count minimization delivering a superior performance offset by an initial higher setup times.