Abstract

Abstract—Network management is becoming increas-ingly challenging with the relentless growth in network size, traffic volume, and the diversity in QoS requirements. Traditionally, the concept of predefined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) has been utilized to establish QoS parameters. However, state-of-the-art technologies in this area are both proprietary and inflexible. To this end, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has the potential to make network management tasks flexible and scalable, and to provide an open platform to encourage innovation. In this paper, we present PolicyCop – an open, flexible, and vendor agnostic QoS policy management framework targeted towards OpenFlow based SDN. PolicyCop pro-vides an interface for specifying QoS-based SLAs and enforces them using the OpenFlow API. It monitors the network and autonomically readjusts network parameters to satisfy customer SLAs. We present experimental re-sults to demonstrate PolicyCop’s effectiveness in ensuring throughput, latency, and reliability guarantees. I.