Delay-Sensitive In-Network QoS Management for Publish/Subscribe Communications

Emerging real-time data-analytics rely on Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) communications to enable automated operations and strategic decision-making in time-critical environments, e.g., Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Pub/Sub systems must ensure strict Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, e.g., low-latency,
that current software-based solutions fail to provide in a deterministic manner due to unpredictable network conditions, and inability to manage bufferbloat and alter network-centric properties such as the queuing delays in switch buffers.
SDN and programmable data planes offer network management capabilities and the ability to change the switch queuing behavior through programmability with Programming Protocolindependent Packet Processors (P4). In this paper, we propose QoS-P4bSub a network-centric solution to enforce strict QoS guarantees for Pub/Sub communications in the context of industrial
Internet of Things (IoT) by leveraging P4-enable hardware and FQ-CoDel inspired active queue management in the data plane. The evaluation of our implementation shows QoS-P4bSub provides a significant improvement of latency determinism with a 64% reduction in tail latency compared to the baseline P4-CoDel.