Admission Control In A Heterogeneous Software-Defined Network

Abstract: Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides centralized control by separating the control plane from the data plane on network devices. Subareas of networking such as Quality of Service (QoS) can greatly benefit from this separation as QoS policies can be provided globally for the network. One way of providing QoS is to reserve and monitor network resources to guarantee a specific data rate for a requested transmission end-to-end. The presented thesis looks into possible ways of controlling the wireless medium using SDN to provide QoS. A method for providing QoS in a multihop SDN network supporting wired and wireless communication was implemented. The method was evaluated using network performance metrics such as throughput and packet jitter. The results of the experiments showed that the implemented method could limit bandwidth utilization and prioritize bandwidth usage for higher priority nodes. The performance of the network was concluded to have severe issues with dropped packets and irregular packet jitter spikes.