Quality of service in software defined networks for scientific applications: opportunities and challenges

Scientific applications require to process, analyze and transfer large volumes of data in the shortest possible time from distributed data sources. In order to improve their performance, it is necessary to provide them with specific QoS parameters. On the other hand, SDN is presented as a new paradigm of communications networks that facilitates the management of the communications infrastructure and consequently allows to dynamically incorporate QoS parameters to the applications running in this type of network. With both these paradigms in mind, we conducted this research to answer the following questions: Do scientific applications that are running in an SDN-Enabled distributed data centers improve their performance? Do they consider network QoS parameters for job scheduling? The methodology used was to consult articles in specialized databases containing the keywords SDN and for scientific applications: HPC and Big Data. Then, we analyzed the articles where these keywords intersect with some of the parameters related to QoS in communications networks. Also, we reviewed QoS proposals in SDN to identify the advances in this research area. The results of this paper are: i) QoS is an open issue to incorporate in scientific applications that are running in an SDN ii) we identified the challenges to join both these paradigms, and iii) we present a strategy to provide QoS to scientific applications that are being executed among SDN-Enabled distributed data centers.