A Survey of Quality of Service (QoS) Protocols and Software-Defined Networks (SDN)

The issue of supporting Quality of Service (QoS) for media applications and other different applications has increased tremendously in industry and the scholarly community. The traditional network architecture became overloaded and congested due to the continued demand for network resources and the limited bandwidth available. The user experience and the academic studies have indicated an increase in limitations and weaknesses of these architectures. A new network architecture paradigm, called Software-Defined Networks (SDN), has received massive attention from researchers and it is used to find new solutions to the limitations found in traditional network architectures. This survey presents an overview of QoS in a traditional network, as well as in SDN. The existing SDN platforms, controllers, and protocols are presented as well as the multimedia flow routing mechanisms being investigated. The survey outcomes will be useful for people in the industry as well as academic researchers identifying current limitations and challenges of QoS within SDN and traditional network architectures.