TY - JOUR
T1 - Improving SDN Scalability with Protocol-Oblivious Source Routing
T2 - A System-Level Study
AU - Li, Shengru
AU - Han, Kai
AU - Ansari, Nirwan
AU - Bao, Qinkun
AU - Hu, Daoyun
AU - Liu, Junjie
AU - Yu, Shui
AU - Zhu, Zuqing
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received February 9, 2017; revised May 25, 2017 and August 9, 2017; accepted October 21, 2017. Date of publication October 24, 2017; date of current version March 9, 2018. This work was supported in part by the NSFC Project 61371117, the Key Project of the CAS (QYZDY-SSW-JSC003), the NGBWMCN Key Project under Grant No. 2017ZX03001019-004, and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the CAS (XDA06011202). The associate editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was G. Leduc. (Corresponding author: Zuqing Zhu.) S. Li, K. Han, Q. Bao, D. Hu, J. Liu, and Z. Zhu are with the School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230027, China (e-mail: zqzhu@ieee.org).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2004-2012 IEEE.
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/3
Y1 - 2018/3
N2 - Software-defined networking (SDN) has been considered as a break-through technology for the next-generation Internet. It enables fine-grained flow control that can make networks more flexible and programmable. However, this might lead to scalability issues due to the possible flow state explosion in SDN switches. SDN-based source routing can reduce the volume of flow-tables significantly by encoding the path information into packet headers. In this paper, we leverage the protocol-oblivious forwarding instruction set to design protocol-oblivious source routing (POSR), which is a protocol-independent, bandwidth-efficient, and flow-table-saving packet forwarding technique. We lay out the packet format for POSR, come up with the packet processing pipelines for realizing unicast, multicast, and link failure recovery, and implement POSR in a protocol-oblivious forwarding-enabled SDN network system. Experiments are then performed in a network testbed, which consists of 14 stand-alone SDN switches, to validate the advantages of POSR. Specifically, we compare POSR with several OpenFlow-based benchmarks for unicast, multicast, and link failure recovery, and confirm that POSR can reduce flow-table utilization effectively, shorten path setup latency and expedite link failure recovery.
AB - Software-defined networking (SDN) has been considered as a break-through technology for the next-generation Internet. It enables fine-grained flow control that can make networks more flexible and programmable. However, this might lead to scalability issues due to the possible flow state explosion in SDN switches. SDN-based source routing can reduce the volume of flow-tables significantly by encoding the path information into packet headers. In this paper, we leverage the protocol-oblivious forwarding instruction set to design protocol-oblivious source routing (POSR), which is a protocol-independent, bandwidth-efficient, and flow-table-saving packet forwarding technique. We lay out the packet format for POSR, come up with the packet processing pipelines for realizing unicast, multicast, and link failure recovery, and implement POSR in a protocol-oblivious forwarding-enabled SDN network system. Experiments are then performed in a network testbed, which consists of 14 stand-alone SDN switches, to validate the advantages of POSR. Specifically, we compare POSR with several OpenFlow-based benchmarks for unicast, multicast, and link failure recovery, and confirm that POSR can reduce flow-table utilization effectively, shorten path setup latency and expedite link failure recovery.
KW - Software-defined networking (SDN)
KW - protocol-oblivious forwarding (POF)
KW - source routing
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U2 - 10.1109/TNSM.2017.2766159
DO - 10.1109/TNSM.2017.2766159
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85032453729
SN - 1932-4537
VL - 15
SP - 275
EP - 288
JO - IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
JF - IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
IS - 1
ER -