Enhanced Unified Communication QoE through Software-defined networking (SDN)

The concept of SDN (Software-defined Networking) originated from Stanford University in 2005 with their CleanState project to redefine the internet from a clean perspective with Control and Data plane separated and the former running on a general purpose server. While enterprises are adopting SDN to address their network routing inefficiencies, Unified Communication (UC) applications like Cisco Unified Communication Manager and Microsoft Lync could be enhanced to monetize their investments. In this paper, we are trying to address the limitation in the UC deployment through SDN which currently has static bandwidth allocation using Call Admission Control (CAC). We are proposing an implementation of a new Unified Communication Control Layer (UCCL) library which could be used by any application including UC core to dynamically allocate requisite bandwidth. This policy-controlled UCCL could be used in conjunction with CAC in UC deployment.