CityFlow, enabling quality of service in the Internet: Opportunities, challenges, and experimentation

In this paper, we propose an OpenFlow enabled Internet infrastructure, using virtual path slicing in an end-to-end path, so that any user connected to an OpenFlow network is dynamically allocated a corresponding right of way. This approach allows an interference-free path, from other traffic, between any two endpoints, on multiple autonomous systems, for a given application flow (e.g., WebHD Video Streaming). Additionally, we propose and implement an end-to-end quality of service framework for the Future Internet and extend the virtual path slice engine to support future Internet technologies such as OpenFlow. The proposed framework is evaluated in distinct multiple autonomous scenarios for a city with a population of 1 million inhabitants, emulating xDSL (Digital Subscriber Line), LTE (Long-Term Evolution) and Fibre networking scenarios. The obtained results confirm the suitability of the proposed architecture between multiple autonomous systems, considering both data and control traffic scalability, as well as resilience and failure recovery. Furthermore, challenges and solutions for experimentation in a large-scale testbed are described.