An automated negotiation framework for application-aware transport network services

Application-centric networking proposes a novel approach to provision connectivity services in transport networks based on application-specific requirements. By exploiting this paradigm, an application can request a service with several requirements to a generic control and management plane, which can leverage this information to differentiate a service on the overall network layers. However, an application-centric provisioning can lead to higher blocking probability when satisfying multiple requirements at the same time, thus impacting negatively both network operators and applications. This paper proposes a framework for the negotiation of connectivity services between a transport network and the applications running on top. In particular, an application can communicate its requirements to it and, in case of resource scarcity (either in term of bandwidth, latency, availability, etc.), the network can offer alternative solutions with a degraded service quality. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is proved by the lower blocking probability experienced by the service requests against a standard approach lacking negotiation capabilities, without in turn causing significant service degradation to the applications. In addition, the paper describes the software architecture behind the negotiation framework and its implementation on top of the ONOS SDN controller.