Evaluating the impact of SDN-induced frequent route changes on TCP flows

Traffic engineering technologies such as MPLS have been proposed to adjust the paths of data flows according to network availability. Although the time interval between traffic optimisations is often on the scale of hours or minutes, modern SDN techniques enable reconfiguring the network more frequently. It is argued, however, that changing the paths of TCP flows too often could severely impact their performance by incurring packet loss and reordering. This work analyses and evaluates the impact of frequent route changes on the performance of TCP flows. Experiments carried out on a network testbed show that rerouting a flow can affect its throughput when reassigning it a path either longer or shorter than the original path. Packet reordering has a negligible impact when compared to the increase of RTT. Moreover, constant rerouting influences the performance of the congestion control algorithm. Designed to assess the limits on SDN-induced reconfiguration, a scenario where the traffic is rerouted every 0.1s demonstrates that the throughput can be as low as 35% of that achieved without rerouting.