Flexible Flow Converging: A Systematic Case Study on Forwarding Plane Programmability of Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF)

Daoyun Hu; Shengru Li; Huibai Huang; Wenjian Fang; Zuqing Zhu

doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2600619

IEEE Access (Jan 2016)

Flexible Flow Converging: A Systematic Case Study on Forwarding Plane Programmability of Protocol-Oblivious Forwarding (POF)

Daoyun Hu,
Shengru Li,
Huibai Huang,
Wenjian Fang,
Zuqing Zhu

Affiliations

Daoyun Hu: School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Shengru Li: School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Huibai Huang: School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Wenjian Fang: School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Zuqing Zhu: ORCiD; School of Information Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2016.2600619
Journal volume & issue: Vol. 4
pp. 4707 – 4719

Abstract

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It is known that software-defined networking (SDN) can support effective traffic engineering (TE) with the global view of networks. Hence, OpenFlow was used to realize flow-based TE. However, there is a tradeoff between the volume of installed flow entries and the granularity of TE. Moreover, the protocol-dependent nature of OpenFlow might limit the flexibility and adaptivity of TE. In this paper, we leverage the protocol-oblivious forwarding technology that can make each switch work as a protocol-independent white box and utilize its forwarding plane programmability to design a novel flexible flow converging (F-FC) scheme for realizing SDN-based fine-grained TE. Specifically, we design both the network system and the F-FC algorithms running on it and conduct experiments to demonstrate that our proposed scheme can not only reduce the volume of installed flow entries in switches but also realize fine-grained TE to achieve better utilization on network bandwidth.

Published in IEEE Access

ISSN: 2169-3536 (Online)
Publisher: IEEE
Country of publisher: United States
LCC subjects: Technology: Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering
Website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6287639

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