A3N: Agile application-awareness in software-defined networks

With the rapid development of various real-time services, there is urgent need for application-aware capabilities in realtime network to meet the higher demand for network's quality of service (QoS), security policy and so on. Accurate and cost-effective collection of flow information is needed. However, the contradiction between the real-time, accuracy and performance cost in the passive traffic information collection mode of old board makes it difficult to build application-aware realtime network of high-accuracy. In this paper, we propose an agile application-awareness network (A3N) for software-defined networks (SDN). A3N implements a flow-based self-adaptive sampling strategy (FSS) for the incoming traffic and combines a parallel deep packet inspection (DPI) with high-performance to perceive network traffic changes. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed A3N can gain good performance with low costs, and also provide real-time application-aware services with deep operational visibility.