Research On The Key Technologies Of Protocol-oblivious Forwarding In Software-defined Networking

Software-defined networking(SDN)separates the control and forwarding planes of a network to make it more programmable.As one of the initial implementations of SDN,OpenFlow abstracts a forwarding device as a flow table and realizes flow pro-cessing by applying the "match-and-action"principle.However,the protocol-dependent nature of OpenFlow still limits the programmability of the forwarding plane.Recently,with the development of the Internet applications,more and more new protocols and novel services have emerged.Based on this fact,the idea of Protocol Independent For-warding(PIF)has attracted more and more attention.Protocol-oblivious Forwarding(POF)is the initial implementation of this idea,it aims to make the SDN data plane can get rid of the dependence on specific protocols and support the matching and processing of any protocol field.However,as the POF is a novel network technology,it still faces the following problems.1)It lacks sound development ecosystem environment.Currently,few con-trollers and switches support POF.2)Flow table resources in a switch are very limited.The flow matching in an SDN switch can realize fine-grained traffic control.But,gener-ally,the hardware(e.g.TCAM)which is used to implement flow table is expensive and power-hungry.Hence,it is a research direction that how to reduce the usage of flow ta-ble and keep the fine-grained flow control at the same time.3)It lacks the PIF-supported network virtualization technology.Slicing a virtual network with protocol-independent nature and high programmability from the substrate has a very attractive prospect.This thesis aims at the aforementioned problems and designs the corresponding solutions one by one.The research contents and main contributions are as follows.·In the control plane,we designed and implemented a controller with full POF capability.The controller can control the POF switch and provide a POF-related northbound interface,which is beneficial to protocol-independent application de-velopment.In the data plane,we accelerate the packet processing throughput of POF software switch by using DPDK technology.Moreover,we set up a POF net-work testbed across wide area network,and deploy the develop POF controllers and switches in it..We design and implement a source routing scheme based on POF,namely POSR.This scheme designs a dedicated source routing header and uses the POF flow instruction set to design and programming the packet processing of the switch.Compared with the traditional solution,POSR can reduce the bandwidth overhead and the usage of flow entries effectively.·We realized the network virtualization hypervisor which follows the idea of PIF,namely SR-PVX.By leveraging source routing and flow table virtualization,SR-PVX can provide POF-enabled vSDN slices to tenants.