PayFlow: Micropayments for Bandwidth Reservations in Software Defined Networks

Abstract

We present PayFlow, a fine-granularity QoS micro-payment system that allows end devices in a software-defined network to make and pre-pay for guaranteed bandwidth reservations for their flows within the network for an arbitrary period of time. PayFlow combines payments using digital currency and storage of transaction records in a distributed ledger with queue-based QoS management using software-defined networks. While the PayFlow architecture is agnostic to the choice of digital currency, ledger technology and SDN platform used, we present a proof of concept implementation of PayFlow using OpenFlow and the IOTA cryptocurrency and distributed ledger, that we evaluate using the Mininet emulator.