Protocol-oblivious Forwarding Based On Software-defined Wide Area Network

A software defined network enables the system to achieve greater programmability,application awareness,and performance.As an important branch,the software defined wide area network is dedicated to improving network performance and intelligent resource management.However,due to the limitations of the OpenFlow protocol,the volume of devices and the range of wide area network,the deployment of software defined wide area network faces scalability and performance issues.This paper mainly studies the protocol-oblivious forwarding technology based on software defined network in the wide area network,and further decouples the control plane and data plane of the network to achieve independence forwarding behavior of protocols and enhances the scalability of the system.For high-traffic wide area network environments,protocol-oblivious forwarding improves the overall performance of the network by reducing the number of flow table entries in the network combined with source-route forwarding.There are many devices and protocols in the wide area network,but the length of the Ethernet frames is consistent.This paper designs an intermediate frame format between the Ethernet header and the IP header to make the flow table handle it by flow instruction set based on offset and length.This source routing method effectively reduces the interaction between the switch and the controller.For the problem that the software defined network coexists with the traditional network,this paper uses the TTL field and the DEC_FIELD flow instruction set to constrain the range of the packet.When it leaves the software defined network boundary,it will be restored to the original format,making the traditional network device forward it normally.Finally,this paper verifies the protocoloblivious forwarding function by checking the header bytes of packets.The stress test is carried out by flooding a large amount of data traffic in both the single-link topology and the multicast tree topology.The performance of this solution and the native OpenFlow protocol is compared.The experiment confirms that protocol-oblivious forwarding technology can achieve better scalability and low-latency,high-throughput performance in software defined wide area network.