Reducing Round-Trip Time in Cloud Environments Using Software-Defined Networking with Intelligent Prefetching and Caching: A Review

Abstract: Round-Trip Time (RTT) is considered the main metric for measuring the performance of applications for end users in today's cloud environments. In order to improve the user experience, RTT has to be reduced by future network architectures. Current architectures are mainly designed to be reactive, meaning that they counteract congestion, user mobility and changes in service demand and resource requirements only after the quality of service that is being provided to users has already been affected. In this paper, we review works that have contributed in this regard and also present a completely integrated proactive network architecture design based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN), machine-learning-based prefetching and an edge cache manager. The architecture is especially suitable for scenarios with high user mobility as well as with high variability of access traffic. In our work, we first present notable technology progress supporting reduced round-trip times followed by a detailed description of the novel architecture. The work also describes a simulation-based approach for evaluating the performance of the architecture. In the end we outline the expected results as well as the challenges that have to be faced during the implementation of the architecture and how these challenges affect future cloud as well as edge networks.

Keywords: Software-Defined Networking (SDN); Predictive Prefetching; Edge-Centric Caching; Round-Trip Time (RTT); Cloud Computing; Quality of Service (QoS); Machine Learning; Network Mobility.