Flow aggregation for SDN-based delay-insensitive traffic control in mobile core networks

Mobile core networks have seen serious network resource contention among a huge amount of delay-sensitive and delay-insensitive traffic leading to network congestion or even failures. Delay-insensitive traffic which is commonly generated by background applications or the operating systems to update the system's status can be postponed to yield network resources for delay-sensitive traffic, especially in the peak times. This study proposes an efficient approach to delay-insensitive traffic control leveraging software defined network (SDN) techniques. The study devises an effective data structure, namely flow tree, to resolve the flow aggregation, an essential issue in SDN-based traffic control, especially when dealing with a huge number of small delay-insensitive traffic flows. The proposed approach significantly reduces the inherent communication cost between the controller and Openflow switches and the storage cost in switches' expensive memories. This approach is significantly robust in controlling a huge number of small flows which are common in the modern mobile core networks and Internet of things environments. Experimental results from both simulated and real datasets reveal the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.