End-to-End Network Delay Guarantees for Real-Time Systems using SDN

Abstract: We propose a novel framework that reduces the management and integration overheads for real-time network flows by leveraging the capabilities (especially global visibility and management) of software-defined networking (SDN) architectures. Given the specifications of flows that must meet hard real-time requirements, our framework synthesizes paths through the network and associated switch configurations - to guarantee that these flows meet their end-to-end timing requirements. In doing so, our framework makes SDN architectures "delay-aware" - remember that SDN is otherwise not able to reason about delays. Hence, it is easier to use such architectures in safety-critical and other latency-sensitive applications. We demonstrate our principles as well as the feasibility of our approach using both - exhaustive simulations as well as experiments using real hardware switches.