Providing bandwidth guarantees with OpenFlow

Quality of Service (QoS) control is an important concept in computer networking, as it is related to end-user experience. While providing QoS guarantees over the Internet has long been deemed too complicated, the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN), and OpenFlow as its most popular standard, may facilitate QoS control. In this paper, we consider how to enable bandwidth guarantees with OpenFlow. Our design allows QoS flows to send more than their guaranteed rates, as long as they do not hinder other guaranteed and/or best-effort flows. Furthermore, our design uses OpenFlow's meter table to aggregate traffic. Our traffic aggregation functionality only adds overhead to the first switch, but no other complexity is incurred at the subsequent switches.