An SDN-Based Framework for Routing Multi-Streams Transport Traffic Over Multipath Networks

Multi-stream transport protocols, such as SCTP and QUIC, tackle challenges such as Head of Line (HoL) faced by TCP. They are getting more and more deployed and currently carry more than 7% of the global Internet traffic. However, since these protocols have limited control over the actual routes the streams will take in the network, the streams are generally forwarded through a single and same path, even though there are generally multiple paths available in the network. Consequently, the traffic streams do not fully benefit from the available bandwidth and performance improvement remains limited. Software Defined Networks (SDN) separate control planes and data planes. It offers a complete view of the network to applications and enables network programmability through flexible rules. These rules may be used to ensure that the different streams generated by multi-stream transport protocols follow multiple paths in the network. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based framework for multi-stream transport protocols in multipath networks. The proposed framework provides an interface for applications to specify multi-stream rules. Based on these rules, the framework uses the services offered by the SDN Controller to ensure that the multiple streams go over multiple paths in the network. Experiments performed show that our proposal improves the QoS offered to the end users.