PolicyCop: An Autonomic QoS Policy Enforcement Framework for Software Defined Networks

Network management is becoming increasingly challenging with the relentless growth in network size, traffic volume, and the diversity in QoS requirements. Traditionally, the concept of predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) has been utilized to establish QoS parameters. However, most state-of-the-art technologies in this area are both proprietary and inflexible. To this end, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has the potential to make network management tasks flexible, scalable, and an open platform to encourage innovation. In this paper, we present the design of PolicyCop, an open, flexible, and vendor agnostic QoS policy management framework targeted towards OpenFlow based SDN. PolicyCop provides an interface for specifying QoS SLAs and then exploits the control plane's API to enforce them. PolicyCop also monitors the network and autonomically readjusts network parameters to meet customer SLAs. We present experimental results to demonstrate PolicyCop's effectiveness in ensuring throughput, latency, and reliability guarantees.