An adaptive traffic engineering approach based on retransmission timeout adjustment for software-defined networks.

Traffic engineering of software-defined networks (SDNs) refers to network traffic monitoring and network status analysis to improve network performance, which can be achieved by addressing a variety of issues such as routing, congestion control, flow control, and load balancing. In this paper, a new traffic engineering approach is proposed that attempts to manage the traffic of SDN by adjusting the retransmission timeout. In the proposed approach, the initial retransmission timeout is determined based on transmission and propagation delays, and then this time is adaptively adjusted according to the priority of the packets, which depends on the type of packet and the number of elapsed hops. The conducted simulations in the Mininet tool have validated the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to counterpart methods in terms of average throughput, average bandwidth utilization, end-to-end delay, and packet loss ratio. Eventually, analysis of the time complexity and message complexity demonstrates that the overhead of the proposed approach is negligible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]