Congestion Control in Software-Defined Networks: A Simulation Study

Abstract

Congestion is an underlying reason for performance degradation in computer networks. Current TCP congestion control has no information about the network. Hence, it increases the sending window to overflow the bottleneck link buffer, and backs off when packet drops are detected. Software-Defined Networking SDN is a new paradigm, which provides information about the network. In this thesis, we propose a novel centralized congestion control scheme for SDN. Our solution exploits the information provided by the SDN controller to prevent formation of persistent queues in bottleneck links. Also, we introduce an SDN Simulation Tool developed in Java, which facilitates simulation experiments. We used our tool to evaluate the proposed solution. The preliminary results shows the potential scalability and flexibility of the protocol.