Research On Stateful Forwarding In Data Plane For Software-Defined Networkng

The Internet has achieved great success and brought enormous ecomomic and social benefits. Meanwhile it faces more and more problems such as scalability, mobility, Qos, security and so on. Software-Defined Networking(SDN) is a new network technology that tries to solve the problems of network architecture. As the prevailing technique of SDN, Open Flow introduces significant programmability and flexibility by decoupling the control plane and the data plane. However, Open Flow only provides a simple “match-action” paradigm and lacks the function of stateful forwarding for SDN data plane, which provides poor expression ability and programmability. In this paper, we propose a Stateful Data Plane Architecture(SDPA) for SDN for the first time internationally. Both software and hardware prototypes of SDPA architecture are developed to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. And we propose a High-Performance and Programmable Architecture(Hi PPA) for NFV that combines configurable hardware and software to effectively support network functions. It enhances the programmability, flexibility, and performance. The main contributions of this paper include:1. We propose an abstract model of SDN data plane based on formal methods. And we propose a stateful forwarding paradigm SFA for the first time. We make further analysis of the essential characteristics of SDN through describing its nature property.2. We propose a novel stateful data plane abstract architecture SDPA and develop various applications based on it for the first time. Through adding Forwarding Processor(FP) and State Table(ST) to SDN data plane, it can maintain state information of network, flows or packets in data plane, which enhances the expression ability and programmability of data plane. And we develop SDPA software switches and various applications.3. We develop a generic and configurable hardware box based on SDPA architecture. Through introducing SFA paradigm and general APIs, it can support dynamic deployment of various network functions and configure several functions on one SDPA hardware box to form a hardware function chain, which can offer high generalbility, programmability and scalability.4. We propose a High-Performance and Programmable Architecture(Hi PPA) that combines configurable hardware and software to effectively support network functions for the first time. Through the unified data plane abstraction, southbound/northbound API and central controlling, it can support dynamic perception of data plane resource/state, resource scheduling and applications orchestrating, which can achieve high performance and flexibility.