Application-based QoS support with P4 and OpenFlow: A demonstration using Chameleon

Although SD-WANs are now widely deployed by several production networks, they are largely restricted to traffic engineering approaches based on layer 4 (L4) of the network protocol stack that result in improved Quality-of-Service (QoS) of the network overall without necessarily focussing on a specific application. However, the emergence of application protocols such as QUIC and HTTP/2 needs an investigation of layer 5-based (L5) approaches in order to improve users’ Quality-of-Experience (QoE). In this demonstration, we leverage the capabilities of flexible switches that incorporate protocol-independent packet processing in order to intelligently route traffic based on application headers. We use Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) video streaming as an example to show how such an approach can not only provide flexible traffic management but also improve application QoE. Our prototype consists of an actual deployment in a research testbed, Chameleon, and a state-of-the-art orchestration and visualization tool, Jupyter, that we integrate with Chameleon in order to provide a single vantage point for SDN experimenters.