Dynamic priority-adjustment for real-time flows in software-defined networks

Network traffic can be divided into delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant traffic. Each delay-sensitive real-time flow has a different end-to-end delay deadline, and has to be delivered by that deadline. In general, real-time flows are to be processed prior to delay-tolerant flows, and each real-time flow may have the relative priority depending on its relative importance of real-time flows. A software-defined networking (SDN) makes it possible to monitor and control flows dynamically in the centralized view of the overall network. In this paper, we propose a priority-adjustment algorithm to guarantee the different delay deadlines of real-time flows in SDN-based networks. Compared to other algorithms, simulation results indicate that the number of real-time flows that satisfy their deadlines is highest in the proposed algorithm.