A flow aggregation method based on end-to-end delay in SDN

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can be applied for managing application flows dynamically by a logically centralized SDN controller and SDN switches. Because SDN switch only support a few thousand installations of a forwarding rule per second, its poor performance becomes a bottleneck for dynamic and scalable application flow management. For this reason, reducing the number of flows is needed to manage application flows. Nowadays, since much attention has been paid to developing a network service that reduces application delay, an allowable delay of application flows has become an important factor. However, there has been no work on minimizing the number of flows while satisfying end-to-end delay of flows. In this paper, we propose using a method to aggregate flows and minimize the number of flows in a network while all flows satisfy their allowable delay as QoS or SLA. Since the problem is classified as NP-hard, we propose a heuristic algorithm. Our simulation evaluation on four different topologies shows that the algorithm effectively reduces the number of flows.