HSDBA: a hierarchical and scalable dynamic bandwidth allocation for programmable data planes

Dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA) is a fundamental challenge in the realm of networking. The rapid, accurate, and fair allocation of bandwidth is crucial for network service providers to fulfill service-level agreements, alleviate link congestion, and devise strategies to counter network attacks. However, existing bandwidth allocation algorithms operate mainly on the control plane of the software-defined networking paradigm, which can lead to considerable probing overhead and convergence latency. Moreover, contemporary network architectures necessitate a hierarchical bandwidth allocation system that addresses latency requirements. We introduce a fine-grained, hierarchical, and scalable DBA algorithm, i.e., the HSDBA algorithm, implemented on the programmable data plane. This algorithm reduces network overhead and latency between the data plane and the controller, and it is proficient in dynamically adding and removing network configurations. We investigate the practicality of HSDBA using protocol-oblivious forwarding switches. Experimental results show that HSDBA achieves fair bandwidth allocation and isolation guarantee within approximately 25 packets. It boasts a convergence speed 0.5 times higher than that of the most recent algorithm, namely, approximate hierarchical allocation of bandwidth (AHAB); meanwhile, it maintains a bandwidth enforcement accuracy of 98.1%.