Hybrid Scheduling for Quality of Service Guarantee of Multimedia Data Flows in Software Defined Networks

Supporting diverse Quality of Service (QoS) performance for heterogeneous data flows generated by multimedia applications has been a challenging issue that is not fully addressed in the Internet. Software Defined Network, which decouples data forwarding and network control, offers a promising approach to QoS guarantee of multimedia flows in the future Internet. However, the currently available QoS mechanisms proposed for SDN have not fully considered the diversity in performance requirements of multimedia data flows. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose a hybrid scheduling scheme in this paper to combine priority queueing with Packet General Processor Sharing (PGPS) algorithm to provide QoS guarantee for multimedia applications in SDN. We apply network calculus to develop modeling and analysis techniques to evaluate the QoS performance of the proposed scheduling scheme. Both analytical and numerical results obtained in this paper show that the proposed scheme can provide QoS guarantee for meeting diverse requirements of multimedia applications.