RT-SDN: Adaptive Routing and Priority Ordering for Software-Defined Real-Time Networking

In this article, an adaptive real-time communication system is proposed that leverages the software-defined networking (SDN) paradigm to provide end-to-end deadline guarantees. SDN is an emerging networking paradigm that allows control of the network through directly programmable software controllers, offering the flexibility to manage and optimize network resources dynamically. By utilizing these SDN features, a novel networking system, called RT-SDN, is presented that can effectively support real-time communication through cooperative routing and scheduling. To this end, we present a highly efficient routing algorithm that can adaptively reconfigure the routes of existing flows to find bandwidth-guaranteed routes for all flows. We then introduce a new priority assignment scheme that can achieve better deadline guarantees (i.e., better schedulability). In addition, RT-SDN allows routing and scheduling to operate together by employing a feedback loop between them. We implemented a prototype of RT-SDN as an SDN controller and deployed it on a testbed network of 30 BeagleBone devices. Our experiment results show that RT-SDN can be deployed in real-world commodity networks to provide end-to-end deadline guarantees, and the proposed schemes collectively improve the schedulability to a significant degree.