There has been a growing demand to manage bandwidth as the network traffic increases. Network applications such as real time video streaming, voice over IP and video conferencing in IP networks has risen rapidly over the recently and is projected to continue in the future. These applications consume a lot of bandwidth resulting in increasing pressure on the networks. In dealing with such challenges, modern networks must be designed to be application sensitive and be able to offer Quality of Service (QoS) based on application requirements. Network paradigms such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) allows for direct network programmability to change the network behavior to suit the application needs in order to provide solutions to the challenge. In this dissertation, the objective is to research if SDN can provide scalable QoS requirements to a set of dynamic traffic flows. Methods are implemented to attain scalable bandwidth management to provide high QoS with SDN. Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP) values and DSCP remarking with Meters are used to implement high QoS requirements such that bandwidth guarantee is provided to a selected set of traffic flows. The theoretical methodology is implemented for achieving QoS, experiments are conducted to validate and illustrate that QoS can be implemented in SDN, but it is unable to implement High QoS due to the lack of implementation for Meters with DSCP remarking. The research work presented in this dissertation aims at the identification and addressing the critical aspects related to the SDN based QoS provisioning using flow aggregation techniques. Several tests and demonstrations will be conducted by utilizing virtualization methods. The tests are aimed at supporting the proposed ideas and aims at creating an improved understanding of the practical SDN use cases and the challenges that emerge in virtualized environments. DiffServ Assured Forwarding is chosen as a QoS architecture for implementation. The bandwidth management scalability in SDN is proved based on throughput analysis by considering two conditions i.e 1) Per-flow QoS operation and 2) QoS by using DiffServ operation in the SDN environment with Ryu controller. The result shows that better performance QoS and bandwidth management is achieved using the QoS by DiffServ operation in SDN rather than the per-flow QoS operation.

The concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN) may be a way to face the fast growing computer network infrastructure with its demands and requirements. The concept is attracting the interest of enterprises to expand their respective network infrastructures, but one has to consider the impacts of migrating from an existing network infrastructure to an SDN network. One way that could minimize the impacts is to proceed a soft migration from a traditional IP network to SDN, creating what is so called a heterogeneous network. Instead of fully replacing the network infrastructure and face the impacts of it, the idea of the soft migration is to replace a part of it with an environment of SDN and examine the performance of it. This thesis work will analyze the performance of a network consisting of a traditional IP network combined with SDN. It is essential during this work to identify the differences in performance when having a heterogeneous network in comparison with having a dedicated traditional IP network. Therefore, the questions that will be addressed during this thesis work is to examine how such a heterogeneous network can be designed and measure the performance of it in terms of throughput, jitter and packet losses. By the method of experimentation and the studying of related works of the SDN fundamentals, we hope to achieve our goals with this thesis work, to give us and the reader a clearer insight.

The aim of the graduation thesis is to evaluate the current development in the field of SDN and the possibility of programmability of SDN elements using the application programming interface. The first theoretical chapter describes the following: the basic architecture of SDN, the traffic within SDN between its individual layers, the communication protocols Southbound interface and Northbound interface. The second chapter of the thesis deals with the programmability of SDN elements with the help of API. The third theoretical chapter describes the current development in the field of SDN. The practical part of the thesis is devoted to creation of two laboratory tasks dealing with the programming of the SDN API. Laboratory tasks include BIG-IP programming from F5 Network and routers from Arista Network. Programming is done using Python via REST API for BIG-IP, or eAPI for Arista EOS. The Ansible setup tool is also used for the same purpose.

The main aim of this work is to become familiar with the technology of software-defined networks and learn to use some of the tools to measure and simulate these networks.