In-network dynamic pathlet switching with VIRO for SDN networks

The current best-effort IP protocol cannot readily provide the bandwidth and other service guarantees that many applications such as video streaming require today. End system based path switching and load balancing across multiple paths have been proposed as an alternative approach to meet the bandwidth requirements of today's applications. These solutions require end systems to be multi-homed so as to exploit the path diversity in today's network. In this work we propose a novel in-network path let switching framework for software-defined networks using the Virtual Id routing Protocol (VIRO). In our framework we take advantage of the built-in fast rerouting and load balancing capabilities of VIRO to perform dynamic path let selection, switching and load balancing to fully exploit the path diversity available in the network. Building upon our current VIRO implementation in GENI, we conduct experiments to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed in-network path let switching framework.