Design And Implementation Of SDN Switch With Configurable Multi-Protocol Support

At present, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has already raised and attracted lots of attention from both academia and industry for its innovative network architecture that separates the network control plane and data forwarding plane to allow third-party software developers define their own data processing and forwarding strategies into the data plane. However, many existed SDN solutions (e.g. OpenFlow) can only let third-party software developers configure instructions to process specific protocols which can be recognized by the data plane in advance. Developers cannot let the data plane support and recognize a whole new protocol at runtime. Besides, conventional protocols and forwarding schemes, such as IP switching, cannot meet the requirements of the increasingly sophisticated and complicated network environment. New protocols and their processing algorithms keep putting forward to reach better network performance. These new designs cannot be well supported by using the original concept of SDN and OpenFlow, which can cause serious problems to third-party software developers.Thus, in order to make SDN architecture can be utilized by new appearing protocols, we use OpenFlow as basis and further extend its architecture to design and implement the SDN Switch with multi-protocol support. We adopts protocol-independent processing schemes in the data forwarding plane, which can not only decouple protocol recognition and data processing&forwarding, but also allow third-party software developers to configure their self-defined protocols into the data plane to let the data plane dynamically recognize and process their new protocols inside data flows. This thesis first introduces the basic architecture of SDN and one of its instantiations:OpenFlow. Then, the thesis analyzes some existed designs about multi-protocol support. On this basis, the thesis introduces the comprehensive design of our SDN Switch, which includes requirement analysis, outline design and detailed design. At last, the thesis demonstrates the implementation and verification about the design as well as proposes some future works.