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Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-73423-1_12

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 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth
and Link Capacity in SDN

Manmeet Singh? , Nitin Varyani? , Jobanpreet Singh, and K Haribabu

BITS, Pilani
Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Pilani Campus
{f2012763,f2009586,f2012124,khari}@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in

Abstract. The traditional networks, with the control and data plane
integrated into the same network devices, do not provide a global view
of the network performance like degree of congestion, bandwidth utiliza-
tion, etc. Software defined network (SDN) is an approach towards this
problem which separates the control plane of the switch from its data
plane and provide a centralized control plane so as to get a global view
of the network performance and thus make decisions of how to regu-
late flows. In SDN, network monitoring can be achieved more efficiently
than traditional networks using OpenFlow statistics. SDN controller can
keep track of available bandwidth on each link and thus estimate end-
to-end available bandwidth of a path simply by composing individual
link bandwidths thus avoiding end-to-end probing. We have made two
contributions in this paper: i) proposed and validated a method to esti-
mate end-to-end available bandwidth on any given path by composing
link-wise available bandwidths ii) proposed a method to measure link
capacity using OpenFlow protocol. We compared our results to the ones
obtained using the state-of-the-art bandwidth measurement tool, Yaz.

Key words: Link Capacity, End-to-End Available Bandwidth, SDN

Controller

1 Introduction
Software Defined Networking(SDN) aims to effectively program the network with
software running on a central controller. Today’s network switches and routers
program their forwarding tables locally, which means that network devices make
their own decisions internally about how to forward traffic. Traffic-forwarding
decisions are informed by distributed control-plane protocols like spanning-tree,
OSPF and BGP. But these traditional networking protocols have limited flexibil-
ity. In order for them to work, all network devices participating in the forwarding
domain have to follow the same rules as defined by the protocol standard. That
leaves little room for creativity or unusual business requirements.
SDN ([1],[2]) is an emerging networking paradigm that overcomes the lim-
itations of current network infrastructures. In case of traditional networks, we
?
Both authors contributed equally to this work
2 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN

have both the control plane and the data plane integrated into the same network
devices. SDN comes up with an approach to break this vertical integration by
separating the control logic from the underlying routers and switches. With the
separation of the control and data planes, network switches performs only the
forwarding operations based on control logic which is implemented in a logically
centralized controller (or network operating system), simplifying policy enforce-
ment and network (re)configuration and evolution [3]. A logically centralized
programmatic model does not postulate a physically centralized system [4]. The
need to achieve adequate levels of performance, scalability and reliability would
resist such a solution. Instead, production-level SDN network designs resort to
physically distributed control planes [4], [5]. To achieve the separation between
the control plane and the data plane we have a well implemented programming
interface between network devices (like switches and routers) and the SDN con-
troller. The controller maintains the global view of the underlying network and
the applications can obtain the statistics of the network state for improved per-
formance. Also, the SDN controller controls the state of the dataplane elements
with the help of well-defined communication protocol. OpenFlow[1],[2] is a proto-
col for communication between the control and the forwarding layers of an SDN
architecture. OpenFlow enabled switches provide important statistics about the
network like port statistics, flow statistics, packets transmitted, packet received
and packet loss.
The statistics obtained using SDN Controller can be used to estimate end
to end available bandwidth. The end-to-end available bandwidth is defined as
the maximum rate that the path can provide to a flow, without reducing the
rate of the traffic in that path. This information can be very useful in congestion
control, streaming applications and network selection. Our paper suggests an
approach to estimate and validate the end-to-end available bandwidth. We have
also proposed a method to estimate the capacity of links using statistics obtained
from SDN Controller. We have validated the end-to-end available bandwidth
values using state-of-the-art tools for bandwidth estimation like Yaz. We have
also analyzed the effect of change in the polling time interval, the time interval
after which SDN controller requests the network statistics, on the estimated
end-to-end available bandwidth.
The reminder of the paper is structured as follows. Sec. 2 presents a short
background on the related work. In Sec. 3 we present our design approach for
measuring end-to-end available bandwidth in SDN. Sec. 4 describes the exper-
imental setup we used to validate our method and Sec. 5 discusses about the
results of tests. Finally, Sec. 6 ends the paper with concluding remarks.

2 Related Work
There are several end-to-end network performance measurement tools proposed
in the literature such as Spruce [1], Pathload [3], IGI/PTR [4], Abing [5],
pathChirp [5], DietTopp [6], Yaz [7], and ASSOLO [8]. These end-to-end mea-
surement tools use packet pair techniques to measure performance metrics like
 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN 3

bandwidth, delay, latency, etc. These techniques need to send packets from one
side in a particular pattern and receive on the other end and analyze the arrival
time etc. These approaches are required to be carried out on end-to-end basis.
These techniques lead to packet duplication if bandwidth values are estimated
for multiple end hosts. This will also cause congestion in network. This may also
lead to increase in packets drop rate because of which estimated bandwidth val-
ues might not be accurate. All these limitations can be easily overcome by the
use of SDN controller which queries network statistics and can estimate end-to-
end available bandwidth for any path without packet duplication. Not only this,
controller can also set high priority to the packets sent for bandwidth estima-
tion so that these packets are not dropped on the way leading to more accurate
bandwidth values than the existing methods.
OpenNetMon[9] is an existing approach in SDN to monitor per-flow metrics
like throughput, delay and packet loss between source and destination. This
approach measures performance metrics for each flow separately and not for a
given path. Our proposed approach measures available bandwidth link-wise and
composes on-demand to find out end-to-end available bandwidth for a given
path. In [10], the authors measures the end-to-end available bandwidth between
any two end-hosts in the network using SDN statistics but their work assumes
link capacity to be known in advance. Our approach measures the link capacity
of the links dynamically without having to run sender or receiver applications
on end hosts. Additionally, we compare our results with well-known tool for
bandwidth estimation in order to validate our results.

3 Design Approach
Our approach learns the topology using the controller API. Using this topology,
it queries the statistics from the switches in the topology. These statistics are
used to estimate the available bandwidth on each link in the network. Instead
of using static values for the maximum capacity, we are estimating the capacity
dynamically. This is because the links which are visible to the controller are not
often the physical links. They may be aggregated links. The Fig. 1 given below
illustrates our approach. The module ”Create Topology” is storing the network
topology fetched from SDN controller and is regularly updated. The module
”Store Port Statistics” stores transmitted bytes for each port in a switch and is
updated more frequently. This module is also storing time elapsed. The module
”Estimate Link Capacity” estimates the link capacity dynamically.
4 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN

Fig. 1. Diagram illustrating our design approach

3.1 Learning topology and consumed bandwidth using controller

A hashable data structure is used to store the topology and consumed band-
width/data rate in each link. A pair (S, D) is used as a key which is mapped
to the ordered set (P1 , P2 , T B, T, DR, M B) where S and D are source and des-
tination mac addresses respectively of two switches connected directly in the
network. Source and destination switches are connected through each other us-
ing their respective port P1 and P2 . DR represents the bandwidth consumed
between source and destination switch, T represents the time elapsed, TB is the
bytes transmitted by the source S to destination D from beginning to time T
and MB is the maximum bandwidth (capacity) of the link connecting the two
switches which is estimated dynamically using the method described in section
3.4. We then calculate the consumed bandwidth/datarate(DR) in the path from
S to D at time Tnew using the formula
DR = (T Bnew − T Bold )/(Tnew − Told ) (1)
where T Bnew denotes the number of bytes transmitted through port P1 since
beginning to time Tnew , T Bold is the number of bytes transmitted through port
P1 since beginning to time Told . Using the Open Daylight statistics, an obser-
vation was made that for two switches connected by a link, the received bytes
by one switch was much more that the bytes transmitted by the other switch
at the ports through which they are connected. Such discrepancy is resolved
by replication of packets from one interface of switch to all another interfaces
within the switch when it receives a packet. Thus, to have proper calculation of
bandwidth available in links, we have used transmitted bytes.
Same data structure is used to store the information regarding which switch
is connected to which end host along with the consumed bandwidth in those
links.
 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN 5

3.2 Finding path between source and destination

For a given flow, we are finding its route on the network set by the controller, and
then calculating its end-to-end available bandwidth. We use the northbound API
provided by the SDN controller for fetching the route of a flow in the network
set by the controller according to the policies.

3.3 Estimating available bandwidth between source and destination

For each link, we subtract Data Rate (DR) from Maximum Bandwidth (MB)
to get available bandwidth of the link. The minimum of the available band-
widths of links along a path is the end-to-end available bandwidth of the path.
Our approach estimates end-to-end available bandwidth by composing link-wise
bandwidth which avoids generation of redundant traffic if bandwidth values have
to be estimated for multiple pair of hosts.

3.4 Estimating Link-Capacity Dynamically

We need the value of the maximum available capacity in order to estimate the
available bandwidth. There are many available Opensource tools which can find
the capacity of the path. Pathrate[11] estimates the bottleneck capacity by send-
ing packet pairs, called probing packets, back-to-back and measuring the disper-
sion of the packet pairs. Dispersion varies among different packet pairs and the
packet pair bandwidth distribution is analyzed to relate it with capacity.
But with these tools, we need to have receiver and sender applications run-
ning on the end hosts. In our approach, the controller itself controls the traffic
and uses the port statistics to measure the capacity of a given link. The con-
troller generates UDP packets with a unique destination port number. Since the
network topology does not change so frequently, the measurement of capacity
need not be so frequent, and thus it will not significantly affect the real traffic.
We added flow entries in the ovs-switches to direct the traffic towards the link
for which we need to measure the capacity. Consider two ovs-switches s1 and s2
connected with a link l whose capacity needs to be estimated. We add a flow
entry in s1 to forward all the packets with the predefined unique UDP destina-
tion port number P to s2. In s2, we add a flow entry to drop the packet with the
unique port number P as these packets are just used for measurement of capac-
ity. We measure the rate at which data is received at s2 using port statistics. As
shown in Fig. 2, the traffic is increased in order to estimate the maximum rate
at which data is received at the receiver end of the link. We stop iterating once
we do not observe any change in the maximum value of received throughput,
which is the final link capacity.
6 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN

Fig. 2. Estimating Link Capacity of 50MB Link

4 Experimental Setup
4.1 Bandwidth Estimation Module

As discussed in previous section, we estimate the available bandwidth between

the source and the destination by composing link-wise bandwidths using statis-
tics obtained from the controller. The bandwidth values will be used by the
validation module to analyze its correctness by comparing it with a well-known
bandwidth measurement tool, Yaz.

4.2 Validation Module

This module takes care of analyzing the difference in the bandwidth values ob-
tained from our work and other available tools. The first measurement is the
value given by our SDN script for bandwidth measurement. The second measure-
ment is the bandwidth value as given by an open source bandwidth measurement
tool, Yaz. While the Yaz adopts heuristic methods for estimating bandwidth by
considering the delay between packet streams, our method uses port statistics
like transmitted bytes in a given link to estimate the bandwidth.
The basic difference between Yaz and our method is that Yaz uses an exper-
imental approach, sending packet probes and observing delays to measure the
available bandwidth but our approach uses a statistical approach, using the data
of all switches in the path to find out the end-to-end available bandwidth.

4.3 Traffic Generation Module

The tool used for generating regulated traffic is Distributed Internet traffic gen-
erator (D-ITG). D-ITG can be used to generate traffic in a network with control-
 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN 7

lable parameters like packet rate, packet size, etc. DITG can be used to generate
traffic in a particular distribution like normal or Poisson distribution.

4.4 Link Capacity Estimation Module

As discussed in Section 3.4, we need to know the capacities of the links in the
path. We estimated the capacity of mininet links for various topologies and the
results are given in Table 1. We have also estimated the capacity of the physical
LAN wire used in our setup in Fig. 5. The actual capacity of the LAN wire used
is 100Mbps.The first row in Table 1 corresponds to the physical LAN wire.
The estimated values (in Table 1) are higher than expected values by a small
amount in all the experiments dues to some experimental errors.

Expected Capacity(Mbps) Estimated Capacity(Mbps)

100 101.2344456787
50 50.2809047531
20 21.4398119679
10 10.8275808985
Table 1. Expected Capacity and Estimated Capacity

5 Results and Discussion

5.1 Results on Mininet Testbed

In our first setup, OpenDaylight was used as a controller and mininet was used
to emulate the topology. A custom topology was created in python for our ex-
perimentation (Fig 3). 10.0.0.11 is the IP address allocated by mininet to the
physical computer in which mininet, opendaylight and library is running and can
be seen in the Fig .3 . Mininet network was connected to the physical computer
using Network Address Translation( –nat).
A cross traffic was generated in the network using iperf tool. At node 10.0.0.4,
a user application is connected to our library and is requesting our library end-
to-end available bandwidth between 10.0.0.4 and 10.0.0.6. As can be observed
from Fig. 4, initially there was no traffic in the network and hence we can observe
the value of 10Gps bandwidth available between 10.0.0.4 and 10.0.0.6.
We can observe a dip at t=20 sec. This is due to udp traffic of 350 Mbps sent
from 10.0.0.6 to 10.0.0.4. Then a udp traffic of 350 Mbps from node 10.0.0.10 to
node 10.0.0.2 was added to the network at around 60 secs. We can observe that
the traffic has become turbulent. Another udp traffic of 350 Mbps from 10.0.0.8
to 10.0.0.5 was added to the network at around 100 secs. We can thus observe a
dip in the bandwidth available at 100 seconds.
8 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN

Fig. 3. Mininet Testbed

Fig. 4. Time vs. end-to-end available bandwidth between 10.0.0.4 and 10.0.0.6

5.2 Results on physical testbed

We created a second testbed which involved a physical link between the switches
to validate our approach in this scenario also. We have created a testbed which
consists of two OVS switches, each installed on a separate physical machine(Host-
2 and Host-4 in Fig. 5). These two machines, and hence the switches, are con-
nected by a LAN wire of capacity 100Mbps. Each physical machine has a Virtual
Machine(VM) acting as a host(Host-1 and Host-3 in Fig. 5). Each of these VMs
are connected to the switches as shown in Fig. 5. Hence we have a linear topology
with two switches and four hosts.
 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN 9

We are using D-ITG for the generation of traffic inside the network. We have
used ryu controller for this test bed.

5.3 Comparing Results with Yaz

Fig.6 shows the end-to-end available bandwidth values obtained from Yaz and
our application plotted against time-stamp. We can observe significant amount
of similarity between Yaz results and our work.
During the experiment, the amount of traffic generated through the link was
varied after every few seconds so as to verify that irrespective of varying the
traffic through the link, the values given by our Ryu script and Yaz tool are
comparable.
The accuracy α in this experiment is computed as:

α = 1 − |(Byaz − Bryu )/Byaz | (2)

Where By az and Br yu is the bandwidth obtained by yaz and ryu respectively.

The graph shows that the bandwidth calculated using our approach is very close
to the actual bandwidth available, as calculated by the tool yaz. These two
measurements come from two methods which use an entirely different approach
from each other, and yet give comparable results and thus provides a ground for
the correctness of our approach. The advantage of this statistical method over the
experimental method of Yaz is that in this case we have the available bandwidth
corresponding to each link in the path which gives us the knowledge of which link
in the path has the minimum available bandwidth. Another advantage of this
method is that it saves time by storing link wise bandwidth which can be used
instantaneously to calculate bottleneck bandwidths for multiple paths. Unlike in
heuristic methods for bandwidth estimation, we do not need to do end to end
probing in our approach which takes a minimum of round-trip time.

5.4 Estimating bandwidth values with different polling time intervals

One of the important parameters in our approach is the time after which port
statistics are requested for every switch from the controller at regular intervals.
It is important to note that in a large network, it will put significant pres-
sure/computing delay on the network if we request stats from the controller
at a high frequency. Therefore it is important that this time gap between two
such requests for statistics is tuned according to the size of the network. We
ran different experiments where we varied the polling time interval. We then
calculated the cumulative of the end-to-end available bandwidth measured by
Yaz and our application across time. In Fig. 7, the absolute of the difference
of the two cumulative values was plotted on the y-axis with the time on the
x-axis. From the figure, we can infer that the difference increases with increase
in polling time. This is because as we increase the polling time, the bandwidth
estimation period will also be increased and we may not be able to capture the
accurate bandwidth with that time delay. But, with the polling time interval of
10 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN

500 milliseconds, the difference in cumulative bandwidth values is smaller and

more closer to the cumulative bandwidth value of Yaz. Thus, for our testbed, we
found the polling time of 500 milliseconds to give most accurate measurement
of end-to-end available bandwidth.

Fig. 5. Testbed with physical link and ovs-switches

Fig. 6. Comparing the bottleneck bandwidth of the obtained path measured using yaz
and our method
 Estimation of End-to-End Available Bandwidth and Link Capacity in SDN 11

Fig. 7. Cumulative Absolute Difference between throughput of Yaz and Ryu

6 Conclusion

In this paper we present an approach to measure end-to-end available bandwidth

in Software Defined Networks (SDN). We have also validated our results with a
well known bandwidth estimation tool, Yaz. The bandwidth calculated by our
approach is very close to the actual bandwidth available, as calculated by the
tool Yaz. We have also presented an approach to find the maximum capacity
of the link dynamically rather than taking static values. We also observed the
impact of controller polling time interval on the estimation of bandwidth.
There are few areas which are still undiscovered like impact of our approach
on the network traffic. SDN controller keeps on querying statistics from all the
switches in network after fixed interval which may lead to excessive traffic. We
may improve upon this in our future work by querying only the selected switches
based on some factors like ignoring stable switches in non-turbulent environment.
We may also work on the understanding the scalability of our approach by con-
sidering larger networks. The proposed solution doesnt require any application
running on end hosts and can be used by various applications to tune the pa-
rameters based on the available bottleneck bandwidth.

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