An effective flow aggregation for SDN-based background and foreground traffic control

Core networks have to contend with a huge amount of traffic, making the networks heavy, congested or even fail, specifically at peak times. However, not all traffic has to be processed immediately. Background (BG) traffic can be delayed to yield network resources for foreground (FG) traffic when needed. This paper proposes an efficient approach to BG and FG traffic control leveraging software defined network (SDN) techniques. We devised an effective data structure, namely a flow tree, for flow aggregation, to reduce the inherent communication costs (between the Controller and Openflow switches) and the storage cost in the switch's expensive memory. Experimental results from both simulated and real datasets reveal the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme, confirming the viability of the proposed SDN-based BG and FG traffic control approach.