A NEAT framework for application-awareness in SDN environments

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has led to a paradigm shift in the way how networks are managed and operated. In SDN environments the data plane forwarding rules are managed by logically centralized controllers operating on global view of the network. Today, SDN controllers typically posses little insight about the requirements of the applications executed on the end-hosts. Consequently, they rely on heuristics to implement traffic engineering or QoS support. In this work, we propose a framework for application-awareness in SDN environments where the end-hosts provide a generic interface for the SDN controllers to interact with. As a result, SDN controllers may enhance the end-host's view of the attached network and deploy policies into the edge of the network. Further, controllers may obtain information about the specific requirements of the deployed applications. Our demonstration extends the OpenDaylight SDN controller to enable it to interact with end-hosts running a novel networking stack called NEAT. We demonstrate a scenario in which the controller distributes policies and path information to manage bulk and low-latency flows.